Summary

  • Abilene combined Qwest’s available fiber, vendor equipment and engineering, UCAID coordination, Indiana University operations, regional GigaPoPs and separate campus connections.
  • The 1998 announcement, autumn demonstrations and 1999 operating launch describe different stages. A 2.4 Gbps backbone did not mean every university had an end-to-end path.

At 622 megabits per second, the University of Washington connected to Abilene in September 1998. That was a striking attachment to a national research backbone, but the circuit reached the network through a regional project that Washington State had helped fund. The distinction explains what the polished national announcement could hide: a fast core was only one part of a working service.

On April 14, 1998, the White House described a collaboration among 122 universities and private firms. Qwest was making 16,000 miles of its fiber network available; Cisco and Nortel were contributing equipment in kind; and the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, or UCAID, was leading the effort as part of Internet2. The release attached a market value above $500 million to Qwest’s fiber. It did not say that universities had bought a new coast-to-coast cable or received $500 million in cash. Nor did it say that every campus circuit was included.

The distinction between promise and operation appeared quickly. By September, UW said it was one of four inaugural sites directly attached to Abilene. It had joined a late-August alpha rollout and brought its 622 Mbps connection into service about a month later. That link sat inside the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP, a regional hub for high-speed network connections. The state legislature had provided startup funding for that regional project. UW also connected to the separate NSF-funded vBNS research backbone, a reminder that Abilene was entering an existing field of specialist networks rather than replacing every path at once.

A November account from Rice University described a public demonstration linking applications at Purdue, Indiana University, the Great Plains Network in Kansas City, UW and San Francisco. Rice said a formal January 1999 launch and about 70 university connections were planned. It was considering Abilene for use after its vBNS contract expired. Rice and Texas A&M were also hosting a Texas GigaPoP, which could connect regional institutions to several high-performance and other networks. The demonstration was real; the projected membership was still a plan.

On February 24, 1999, a partner release said Abilene had begun nationwide operations serving 37 universities. It reported a network spanning more than 10,000 miles at 2.4 Gbps, and expected more than 60 universities and research facilities to connect by year-end. The same release estimated partner equipment and services at $500 million over three years. The earlier 16,000-mile Qwest network and the later 10,000-plus-mile Abilene footprint are separate claims made at different dates; the sources do not give enough detail to reconcile their route measurements.

It assigned different jobs: Qwest supplied fiber and engineering support; Cisco supplied routers and support across the 11 nodes; Nortel supplied network planning, engineering and optical systems; Indiana University ran the network operations center and handled problem resolution and asset management. These are estimates and claims in a partner announcement, not an audited cash budget.

The difference between backbone and reach remained visible later. In 2000, MIT described joining Abilene through Boston’s Northern Crossroads GigaPoP. MIT’s link into Abilene was 155 Mbps while the backbone ran at 2.4 Gbps. The university cautioned that not every location was reachable through the new connection. The regional hub also linked to commercial providers and other campuses, so it did more than extend a single national pipe.

Abilene’s construction story was therefore distributed. UCAID coordinated the project; a carrier supplied a fiber platform; technology partners supplied equipment and expertise; Indiana University staffed operations; regional consortia aggregated institutions; and campuses arranged their own paths into those hubs. The sources do not establish every member’s invoice or who owned each segment. They do establish why a backbone headline could not answer the practical question a researcher faced: was the destination connected through my regional hub, and what route would get my data there?

Source records: White House archive, 14 April 1998; University of Washington News, 28 September 1998; Rice News, 5 November 1998; Cisco partner release, 24 February 1999; Indiana University GlobalNOC, About; MIT News, 18 October 2000.