Background

The Northern Crossroads (NoX) is an informal affiliation of approximately two dozen institutions with a common interest in facilitating advanced networking in New England. Participants include institutions of higher education and partner organizations that support research, education, and economic development. The goals of the NoX are to:

NoX participants meet regularly at Boston University to consider issues at hand and to hear from and talk with advanced network advocates, manufacturers, and service providers about their efforts, products, and services, as well as their commitment to advanced networking initiatives such as Internet2.

In October 1999, the NoX established a robust service platform to support the goals of its participants under a colocation arrangement with Qwest at their point-of-presence (PoP) in Boston at 230 Congress Street. Over the years, the NoX has expanded to 300 Bent Street in Cambridge under a colocation arrangement with Level 3 and to 1 Summer Street in Boston. These service points are interconnected by a vast array of optical fiber, offering virtually unlimited bandwidth to serve the growing needs of our community. The primary purpose of these facilities is to share the cost of a connection to the Internet2 Abilene network and to establish a high-performance regional exchange for participants & commodity Internet service providers.

The NoX distributed exchange consists of an array of high-performance routers and switches interconnected to each other, to subscribers, and to regional and national network service providers. When subscribers connect to this exchange, local traffic remains within the exchange, improving performance and reducing demand on more congested and costly backbone neworks.

NoX-AP participants connect to the AP in various ways, including dark fiber and metro and regional managed services. Through our ongoing partnership with NEREN, the NoX fosters the design, development, and distribution of regional optical networking throughout New England.

In 2000, the NoX joined forces with other R&E regional network service providers to form The Quilt, a forum where leaders from throughout the regional networking community build on the intellectual capital and best practices of network service providers worldwide.

If you have an interest in the activities of the NoX or you wish to contact your institutional representative, please contact us.

Contributed & maintained by:
Michael Krugman
Information Systems and Technology
Boston University