Jun 26, 2001 12:00 PM,

BellSouth lights up Florida with new optical network access point

Liane H. LaBarba

Internet traffic is faced with bottlenecks in many areas around the country. Much of the traffic originating in areas such as Florida has been forced to go to the nearest network access points (NAPs) in Dallas or Washington, D.C. But BellSouth is hoping to change that with the turn up of its new NAP in Florida called the BellSouth Multimedia Internet Exchange (MIX).

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It is the first NAP to be built in the past six years and will be used as a top processing point for traffic from Latin America.

BellSouth started the MIX about around a year ago and has now lit the NAP. Unlike the existing eight NAPs around the country, BellSouth’s MIX will utilize optical switching technology. The other NAPs are based solely on ATM with interfaces up to about OC-12, so the capacity to reach OC-192 simply didn’t exist.

“South Florida is becoming known worldwide in the area of technology,” said Florida Lt. Governor Frank Brogan. “We want to make sure the communications infrastructure is second to none.”

Although the idea of lowering latency and improving capacity is always good, BellSouth does have other motives. The provider plans to attract businesses to the southern Florida region and serve companies sending traffic to and from Latin America.

To help ease MIX customers’ connections, the NAP has four different nodes throughout the Southern Florida region. Other NAPs have one central location, forcing users to backhaul traffic to those facilities. By spreading nodes around the region, those users won’t have as far to go, according to Ralph de la Vega, president broadband and Internet services for BellSouth. BellSouth is using Sycamore’s SN-8000 and SN-16000 in the MIX and will use ATM equipment from Cisco for public peering.

“The core of the network is electrically switched,” said Jeff Keil, vice president and general manager of Sycamore’s core switching division.

The other participants for the MIX are Cisco Systems, FPL FiberNet, ImpSAT, IWC, Qwest Communications, UUNet and Nova Southeastern.