What is the future for a federally-funded backbone?
The NSFNET backbone will likely be gone by the time this article is published, or soon thereafter. With the proliferation of commercial back bones and regional network interconnections, a general-purpose federally subsidized backbone is no longer needed. In the new NSF awards just an nounced, the NSF will only fund a set of Network Access Points (NAPs), which will be hubs to connect the many private backbones and regional networks. The NSF will also fund a service that will provide fair and efficient routing among the various backbones and regionals. Finally, the NSF will fund a very-high speed backbone network service (vBNS) connecting the six supercomputer sites, with restrictions on the users and traffic that it can carry. Its emphasis will be on developing capabilities for high-definition remote visualization and video transmission. The new U.S. network structure will be less hierarchical and more interconnected. The separation between the backbone and regional network layers of th
