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December 19, 2006

FAYETTEVILLE - Arkansas’ flagship university demonstrated the state’s first connection to the national “e-corridor,” an ultrafast Internet connection touted by researchers as a must-have economic development tool.

Faster than a speeding “Internet 2” signal, the next-generation connection can deliver crisp, real-time videoconferencing.

It allows researchers to e-mail large, complex data files, 3-D images and video using 2,000 times the bandwidth available to the highest standard DSL or cableservice connections, officials at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville said in unveiling its new link Monday.

Gov. Mike Huckabee first heard of the e-corridor network, National LambdaRail, at meetings of the Southern Governors Association and other regional groups, where he learned Arkansas was an island because it lacked connections.

“I remember feeling a sense of shame and outrage,” he said Monday during a news conference at the Fayetteville campus.

During the 2005 legislative session, the governor initially wanted at least $10 million to wire some of the state’s fouryear universities, his office said at the time, but he and lawmakers couldn’t agree on full funding.

Huckabee believed in the potential of the e-corridor so much, that nearly a year ago he handed Fayetteville campus officials a $6.4 million check to begin connecting it and the state’s other four-year public universities to the network. He used money from his share of the state’s General Improvement Fund to begin building the state’s tieon system, called the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network.

The Fayetteville campus links to the nearest National LambdaRail point, which is in Tulsa.

David L. Merrifield, UA’s associate director of computing services, estimated it will take at least 18 months before Arkansas’ other 10 four-year universities can take the initial step that UA’s Fayetteville campus took Monday. Officials are researching how much more money it will take the state to buy or build infrastructure so the other universities can be wired.

And it may take the Fayetteville campus a few years before most or all academic offices there can link to the e-corridor, said Merrifield, who led a session Monday detailing how he is helping the state acquire existing fiber-optic infrastructure for all 11 universities.

This spring, UA’s Amy Apon, professor of computer science and computer engineering, and Thomas Sterling, a professor at Louisiana State University’s Center for Computation and Technology, will teach a class together from their respective campuses.

LSU is among the universities in 15 other states hooked to the e-corridor.

The class will combine the traditional distance-learning model with the new, soupedup technology to unite two farflung classrooms. UA and LSU officials demonstrated how the e-corridor connection is expected to eliminate the slow, jerky video-streaming and illegible multimedia presentations people often see during traditional videoconferencing.

As Huckabee and UA Chancellor John White sat at a conference table in UA’s Mullins Library, they talked via video with Edward Seidel, director of the LSU center.

To the lay person, Seidel’s image appeared in ultracrisp high definition television from a brightly lit office on the LSU campus. The video and audio were synched and appeared to play in real-time.

Behind Seidel, one large computer screen displayed a colorful, sharp aerial view of a tropical island while another perfectly displayed a Power-Point text presentation. While the picture was not 3-D, it seemed to be, offering three layers of sharp depth that almost resembled the motion-picture version of a child’s ViewMaster slide show.

LSU and UA officials were only too happy to translate this into geek-speak.

The high-definition TV now available in homes displays in megabits per second, while the e-corridor video technology demonstrated Monday is measured in gigabits - 3 gigabits per second, to be exact, said Mike Abbiatti, a Fayetteville alumnus who is now the e-corridor point man for the Louisiana Higher Education Board of Regents. A gigabit is at least 1,000 times faster than a megabit and much faster still than the kilobit used to measure telephone communications, he said.

UA’s Merrifield added that the 3 gigabit connection featured a 1.5 gigabit lane each way between the two campuses. The high-resolution picture in Monday’s video demo used far more pixels than the standard high-definition televisions available for home use, measured as 1,080 p. compared with 720 p.

The national e-corridor network was a legacy of the dotcom boom a few years ago.

Back then, telecommunications companies buried a network of fiber-optic cabling underground, mostly along interstate highways around the country, but did not activate it at the time. After the dot-com bust, the companies gave up control of the lines, with large expanses of it going to groups such as the Southeastern Universities Research Association.

National LambdaRail Inc., a consortium of research universities and private-sector technology companies, acquired the capability to activate the cable, beginning in stages in November 2003.

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