MCI Communications Corp and the US National Science Foundation announced a five-year programme to develop a new very high-speed Backbone Network Service, vBNS, under a $50m development effort intended to create a network that can transmit data four times faster than existing technologies. The experimental network will use fibre optics to connect five US supercomputing sites for speech, data and video transmission. The network will use MCI’s existing Asynchronous Transfer Mode and Synchronous Optical Network infrastructure, and will initially run at 155Mbps, but is to be upgraded to 622Mbps by 1996. It will connect the Pittsburgh and San Diego Supercomputing Centers; the Cornell Theory Center; the National Centre for Supercomputer Applications in Urbana, Illinois; and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Areas of research include aviation safety, diet and nutrition, energy efficiency, environmental studies and new drug development, the partners declared.
