Municipal network hitches ride on Florida LambdaRail

• By William Jackson
• Mar 01, 2013

The city of Boynton Beach, Fla., is building out a new municipal network that takes advantage of the Florida LambdaRail to access the world.

Palm Beach County has its own optical Point of Presence on the FLR backbone, part of a 1,540-mile 20 gigabit-per-second high-speed network run by the a dozen equity partners and 12 universities and that is linked with regional, national and international research and education networks.

The Florida project is an offshoot of the National LambdaRail, operated by more than 280 U.S. universities, research institutions and government laboratories, including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The fiber optic backbone of the National network provides a testbed for advanced research and networking in government and academia. NASA uses it for high-speed links between facilities, and it provides the backbone for much of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid and the Energy Department's U.S. Large Hadron Collider network.

Florida LambdaRail is a non-profit corporation formed in 2003 and operates the state-wide fiber optic network on behalf of member universities and communities.