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Internet Connectivity

Demand for Internet bandwidth at Carnegie Mellon continues to increase, and the Network Group works to provide a reliable and sizable connection. Carnegie Mellon is a net exporter of data to other hosts on the Internet.

Network Bandwidth

Our Internet connection comes to us through the Pittsburgh GigaPOP, a consortium of Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, University of Pittsburgh, and other participants. It's operated by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Currently the participants share the following bandwidth:

Commodity Internet

Demand is highest for so-called commodity traffic. This is traffic destined for Internet sites that cannot use a better path (below). The GigaPOP currently purchases 500Mbps of commodity bandwidth from Verio, and AT&T. Carnegie Mellon can consume 150Mbps of this bandwidth.

Internet2 (Abilene)

Abilene is a high-speed research network linking Carnegie Mellon with other Universities in North America as well as overseas. We continue to encourage users to use Abilene bandwidth whenever possible. For example, when downloading a file from one of several mirrors, choosing a mirror at another University will likely be much faster, as it will travel the Internet2 network. The GigaPOP is connected via an OC-48 (2.4Gbps) link to the Abilene core node in Washington, DC.

PitX

The Pittsburgh Internet Exchange is a local peering point between the GigaPOP and other local ISPs and service providers. Users with home DSL connections through other PitX members should experience faster connections to campus. The GigaPOP has a 100Mbps connection to PitX (though the other participants are generally connected at much slower speeds).

Carnegie Mellon's Infrastructure

Currently Carnegie Mellon's primary connection to the GigaPOP is via a Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps) fiber link. We have two OC-3 (155Mbps ATM) backup links, should the primary link fail.

Computing Services constantly monitors our external connection and profiles traffic to ensure reasonable connectivity. Currently we are averaging approximately 70Mbps incoming traffic from the commodity Internet, and 80Mbps outgoing.

For more network statistics, visit our network statistics page.
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