Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) was awarded $350,000 [NSF Proposal Number 9985934] from the NSF 98-102 Connections to the Internet program (category c) to establish a high performance connection to Internet2 (Abilene Network) via the Virginia MetaPOP. The award was effective February 1, 2000 and expired January 31, 2003.

The NSF support allowed VCU to upgrade its connection from DS-3 (45 Mb) to an OC-3 (155 Mb) connection to facilitate the further development and collaboration of numerous meritorious applications across the VCU Campuses and with other Internet2 sites.

As part of an ongoing plan to upgrade its networking capability, VCU is connected to the Abilene network as a member of the Network Virginia NG (next generation), a consortium of universities, technology providers and information service providers in the Middle Atlantic states that are creating a MetaPOP in the Washington D.C. area. VCU has also upgraded its current DS-3 line into Network.Virginia to an OC-3 connection which will serve to carry meritorious project traffic to Abilene as well as serve as the link to the commercial Internet.

VCU was a participant in the creation of both the Virginia Educational and Research Network (VERNet) and its current successor, Net.Work.Virginia. VCU’s plans to use NetWork.Virginia NG as a cost-effective gateway to Abilene, the vBNS, and other critical research networks through the Network Virginia NG. VCU was an early adopter of ATM for both campus backbones and at the workstation level to deliver educational multimedia to the desktop. VCU has an array of current and new research applications that require increased bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) that would be provided by connecting VCU to the Abilene network. VCU’s current connection to Net.Work.Virginia is insufficient to support the network traffic for our growing clinical, research, and teaching needs.