The College was one of 35 schools that received a grant from the National Science Foundation last week -- a grant which will allow for the implementation and maintenance of faster computer connections with other colleges and universities.
Dartmouth will get $350,000 over two years for implementation of a "very-high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS)" -- which is intended for higher education institutions with "meritorious research that requires high-speed network connections between like institutions," according to Director of Computing Larry Levine.
The vBNS is a network similar to the Internet that allows research institutions to connect to each other at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than the current Internet permits.
The College will share the total $12.3 million grant with 34 other research institutions across the country. According to a U.S. newswire release, this grant will bring the total number of institutions connected to the vBNS to 64.
Levine said the fact that Dartmouth received the NSF grant the first year it applied is indicative of the "state-of-the-art quality research" that takes place at the College.
He said the purpose of the grant is to keep the high-speed network isolated and support research that requires high-speed connections.
According to information on the College's World Wide Web site, types of research at Dartmouth that will benefit from the connection to the vBNS include satellite reception in the physics department, video reception and transmission with other colleges and multimedia information retrieval.
In addition, vBNS serves as "a testbed for advanced communications and networking technologies that might eventually be deployed in support of the greater Internet," according to a website dedicated to high-performance connections.
The vBNS "enables specific research endeavors, and a side benefit is that everything else will work more quickly," Levine said.
He said Dartmouth's "commodity Internet traffic," such as BlitzMail and "favorite Netscape sites" will leave the campus on the high-speed connection and will then make its way out onto the Internet if the location being connected to is not on the vBNS.
He said the Internet is a backbone network everyone uses, but the vBNS is another backbone network that will serve all the institutions that choose to connect. He compared it to a "sewer pipe" leaving the College carrying information instead of the Internet's "garden hose" that slowly trickles information.
Levine said the current speed at which Dartmouth users can connect to the Internet is 1.5 megabits, or 1.5 megabytes per second. This will increase to three megabits in July because of improvements to the College's networking system.
By late fall or early next winter, Levine said, the College will upgrade to 45 megabits because of the grant. And then "hopefully within a year after that we would go to 155 megabits -- about 50 times greater than a three-megabit" connection, Levine said.
The NSF grant will bring $175,000 to the College for two years, for a total of $350,000. Levine said the actual cost to connect to the vBNS will be more than the grant, but the $350,000 "takes the lion's share of the cost."
"The grant makes it quite attractive [to connect to vBNS] because Dartmouth has to pay to be on the Internet at 1.5 megabits, anyway," he added.
