Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc, now concentrating on its new prime focus of becoming a major Internet services provider, is to buy a university-owned provider for the south-east US: it has a letter of intent to acquire Southeastern Universities Research Association’s SURAnet Internet service on undisclosed terms. SURAnet is owned by 41 universities, and its Internet operations are run from College Park, Maryland and the company would say only that the proposed price for SURAnet was lower than the $35m in cash and stock that America Online Inc just agreed to pay for Advanced Network Services Inc, another Internet provider: Bolt Beranek’s Internet Services Corp unit had looked at Advanced Network but decided it did not have enough to offer. Even if it doesn’t make further acquisitions, the Cambridge, Massachusetts company expects to provide Internet service US-wide next year and ultimately has global expansion plans. Meantime the BBN Systems & Technologies division has won a contract from the US National Science Foundation to develop new networking technologies for use in science and maths education. The $523,000 contract calls for it to develop MuseNet, an interactive, high-bandwidth multimedia communications environment accessible simultaneously by multiple users over a network. The idea is that educational programs should be distributed through network servers for local operation on client machines.
