Michigan’s Merit network

This week WiscNet‘s Internet2 K20 webconference featured Jim Moran from Merit Network, Inc. Merit is Michigan’s version of WiscNet. As Outreach Lead Coordinator Jim shared his experiences how Michigan schools are using high-bandwidth applications.

Michigan has 15 public universities but no single university system like Wisconsin. Merit began in 1966 with the University of Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State connecting for mainframe access. Today Merit has now grown connecting to Chicago and Canada, extending their regional partnerships.

In 1992 Merit grew to include K12 and Libraries. Merit’s mission is to be a respected leader in developing and providing advanced networking services to the research and education community. Merit is a trusted source for providing high quality network infrastructure, initiating and facilitating collaboration and providing knowledge and technology transfer through outreach. At the Internet2 conference in Chicago this past December we learned that as many schools would like to jump to 100Mb/s connections, Merit provides burstable bandwidth up to 800Mb/s for K12s today! Merit is owned and managed by public universities and not directly supported by the state of Michigan. This means it does have to compete with telecommunication companies.

Overview
Jim addressed the development and maintenance of Merit’s advanced network, embracing communities around the state, the transfer of knowledge and new types of research underway at Merit. It should be noted the distance from Detroit to Washington DC is shorter than the distance from Detroit to the western edge of the UP. I’m not sure everyone realizes how large a state Michigan is in the Midwest.

The biggest impression I walked away with is the great community value Merit (and WiscNet) provide to schools in both k12 and higher education. A personal approach to solving complex networking problems while sharing knowledge in academic and research settings. Can any school’s commercial ISP take a router down for an hour to address and issue? No. With Merit and WiscNet….yes.

Jim also addressed the issue regarding fiber vs copper. Copper cannot scale to the needs of today’s network requirements. Rate cards have really placed telcom providers into an uncomfortable position when today’s researcher requires real-time analysis of data, petabytes in size coming from CERN. Copper does not scale where fiber can extend the network from Ann Arbor to Zurich. This is one point that needs to be delivered to existing K12 districts and colleges not affiliated with academic and research networks today. They must see the advantage of community that Merit certainly provides.

I also enjoyed Jim’s analysis of how networks and related equipment have been effected by globalization. The ability for you today to upgrade your home kitchen or bathroom via Home Depot is very similar to the access networks have with digital tools today: lease rights for gigabit ethernet. You can secure six strands of fiber for 30 gigs today and plan to scale up any time in the future to 290 gigs. Goodbye copper. With the scaleability over copper Merit was able to plan to pay off a fiber upgrade in the first seven years of a twenty year lease and breath for an additional thirteen years…with upgrades as needed.

Merit’s challenge statewide: counties with private fiber (Cox or Charter?) that does not directly connect to Merit, Dark Fiber from Telcom providers that does connect AND leased provisional services (high-speed) with directly connections. The driving application for scaling up from copper to fiber: video. Broadcast, Interactive and High Definition all point to better choices for Merit to adopt fiber. Jim has suggested (and I agree) it will become one of the single largest applications for Internet2.

Jim did acknowledge his challenges. Small, remote school districts in the Upper Peninsula (UP) need to stream 768K video to 8000 laptops wirelessly….that’s a problem on any network.

Its an impressive statement for Merit to acknowledge they have every school wireless for the past seven years. Its no wonder that Michigan is the first state in the union to require an online experience for students to graduate from high school.

Globalization
In this globalized world Merit has outsources databases to as far away as California, firewall and anti-spam to London and math tutoring to India.

“Give them what they really want”:
Michigan’s Virtual High School provides students access to study Mandarin from a teacher in China. I could not agree more…with a niece and nephew living in Michigan, they have a bright future thanks to the efforts of Merit.

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