High-speed fiber optic network is being expanded for higher education and research in Indiana

The I-Light network is a unique collaboration in Indiana between colleges and universities, state government and private sector broadband providers. Indiana colleges and universities are connected directly to I-Light at speeds from 1 Gigabit to 10 Gigabit with the ability to provide even larger, on-demand wavelengths between research groups on various campuses, when that functionality is needed. I-Light dramatically improves Indiana's position as a national leader in very high-speed networking in support of teaching, learning, research, technology transfer, and inter-institutional collaboration and cooperation, activities that will help fuel the State's economy.

I-Light has enabled a community forum for the sharing of information. In addition to providing more bandwidth than most Indiana colleges and universities could otherwise afford, the network provides a variety of other capabilities such as connecting classrooms at distant locations with high-quality video-streaming and allowing researchers at any location to exchange large digital data files and access to supercomputers and scientific data storage facilities. It makes possible multi-campus collaborative research projects and enables the use of high-definition learning tools such as telepresence, a new way of video conferencing that gives the user the appearance of being at the same location.

I-Light was initiated in 1999 with a 5.3M state appropriation by the Indiana General Assembly. The state initially built a fiber network to connect its primary research universities of Indiana University Bloomington, Purdue University West Lafayette, and the joint campus in Indianapolis. The network proved its value to grow research and education funding through high performance computing, competitive research grant success in Life Sciences and Engineering, connections to Internet2, National Lambda Rail, and favorable economics with the Indiana GigaPop for the state to efficiently pool network traffic.

In November, 2005, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels announced his intention to release 12M dollars of funding for the I-Light Expansion Project and assigned to Indiana University and Purdue University responsibility for the expansion, management, and operation of the resulting statewide I-Light network. This development expanded the original I-Light network far beyond the Bloomington-Indianapolis-West Lafayette corridor that it had served to this point.

The I-Light backbone network is comprised of 1176 total miles of fiber. I-Light only needed to construct a total of 60 Miles of fiber to complete the backbone or for last mile fiber connections as a part of the I-Light expansion project. 120 Miles of fiber was constructed as a part of the initial I-Light network connecting Indiana University and Purdue University.

I-Light has worked with a number of telecommunication providers in the State to build out the I-Light backbone network and for last mile connections from the various colleges and universities. I-Light has entered into separate contracts with more than 38 companies to secure fiber leases, fiber construction, leased circuits, co-location space, hardware and anything else that is needed to support the network. All of the funds that were appropriated by the State in support of I-Light have gone to these companies.

There are nineteen major connection points called nodes at the following locations: Indianapolis, Anderson, Muncie, Marion, Ft. Wayne, South Bend, Gary, West Lafayette, Greencastle, Columbus, Terre Haute, Valparaiso, Westville, Richmond, New Albany, Vincennes, Evansville, Bloomington, and Kokomo which support the network. Installation of each of these nodes required contracts with campuses or private companies for equipment space and power. I-Light engineers installed state-of-the-art optical hardware in all the nodes along the network path. The Northern Ring of I-Light began connecting customers in October 2006. Currently there are 35 higher education sites connected to the network.

The I-Light connection to the Indiana GigaPop provides a package of high-speed research network interconnectivity to national networking infrastructures like Internet2 and NLR as well as extensive, high performance commercial Internet bandwidth providers.

The I-Light network is supported by the Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) at Indiana University, a premier provider of highly responsive network coordination, engineering and installation services that support the advancement of Research and Education networking. The GRNOC has become an unrivaled provider of 24x7x365 expert support for the most advanced research networks in the country.