nox.com Information

The Northern Crossroads (NoX) is an informal affiliation of over 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: Foster advanced networking in support of research and education in New England; Share intellectual capital and material resources to further the development and delivery of advanced network services and applications to our communities; Aggregate services to benefit from economies of scale; Encourage collaboration among participating institutions and our respective academic communities; Consolidate regional representation of our interests to the larger national and international community, and; Collaborate with other organizations pursuing advanced networking. 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 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 ...