Ohio’s 100 Gigabit-per second Initiative

COLUMBUS, OH- In February of 2012, Ohio launched a ten-fold boost to its broadband network speeds which enhanced research and created jobs statewide. Governor John Kasich announced the initiative at his State of the State address.

Since the launch two years ago the broadband network has come far with advancing the technology across the state. The broadband infrastructure has over 1,800 miles of fiber from its current 10 Gigabits per second(Gbps) to 100 Gbps.

100 Gigabits per second is a lot where as an iPhone has only 8, 16, 32, 64 gigabits. Think about this as a 100-gig capacity of moving data all the time across the state.

It takes real data, video, electron microscope data, research data, Netflix movies and library content such as Ohio LINK. All of that is then sent back to massive computers working at high speeds.

In 1986, the state was running on 56 kilobit. “You probably won’t even hear about it anymore,” said Pankaj Shah who is the executive director for the Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet).

“Right now we have all higher education on the network, all k-12 schools, public broadcasting stations on the network and hospitals,” he said.

Ohio Technology Consortium along with OARnet is slowly working towards getting all state agencies on the network currently within the next year and a half. “All of the state of Ohio agencies across 88 counties are slowly being brought on to the network,” Shah said.

“We are the leaders [of the initiative],” Shah said. “Other states are following and trying to do this.” States including, Michigan, North Carolina, California and Indiana are currently in the process of getting a network like Ohio’s up and running.

“We are the first in the country to come up with a comprehensive plan,” Shah said.

Shah explained Kasich’s motive was economic development and creation of jobs for the state. “Using technology to better our work force, to improve our education system in order to provide the best tools that our students and our workforce can compete throughout the world,” he said.

All universities have gone up in usage already. For example, The Ohio State University as well as Case Western has already connected to backbone x100gig. However, all Ohio universities are at least connected to one gig.

Specifically, all Kent State University branch campuses are connected through the backbone.

“All [Kent State University] branch campuses were initially connected at a smaller bandwidth and are now all connected using the backbone,” Shah said. “So they don’t have to go point to point back to Kent State, but Kent students can connect anywhere in that state.”

Professor Javed Khan, Chair of Kent State’s Department of Computer Science, is leading a project to help train engineers from Bangladesh, in partnership, with (OARnet).

The project is called Bangladesh Research Education Network (BdREN) and will be a high-speed data communications network that will meet the needs of thousands of universities and higher education institutions in Bangladesh.

Kahan agrees the broadband initiative is at the cutting edge of technology.

Kent State University along with Khan and Shah are working with Bangladesh to train engineers to get their broadband connection up and running by the middle of 2015.

Bangladesh is similar to Ohio in size, but they have 7200 universities.

“Ohio led the pack by connecting all universities to fiber optic broadband public investments,” Khan said. “We have adapted the same model for Bangladesh.”

Members of Bangladesh are coming to Ohio for training; it’s essentially an internship for them. Trainers from Ohio are giving them training, advice, design ideas and then they take the knowledge they learned back to their country. After returning to Bangladesh the members are all hands on with setting up the broadband. They learned here what to do if something goes wrong and how to fix it.

Kent State students aren’t currently involved in training anyone Bangladesh.