With a new "dark fiber" pipe, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva will for the first time have a high-bandwidth data connection to the Ithaca campus, and Cornell will have backup access to nationwide research networks.

The university has signed a 20-year lease with Finger Lakes Technologies Group Inc. of Victor, N.Y., for optical fiber between Ithaca and Rochester, with a connection at Geneva. "Dark fiber" refers to fiber with no electronic connections. Cornell will install and maintain the equipment that "lights" the fiber by sending and receiving information-bearing pulses of laser-generated light. (In the alternative "lit fiber" arrangement, a service company maintains the equipment and carries messages for a fee.)

Cornell has leased one pair of fibers, which will initially provide a 10 gigabit-per-second path to Geneva. Additional 10Gb services can be added as needed, according to Dave Vernon, director of the Network and Communications Services division of Cornell Information Technologies.

"This will allow videoconferencing between Geneva and Ithaca and give researchers there access to the Center for Advanced Computing and large databases on the Ithaca campus," Vernon said. "In addition the Geneva facilities can now be leveraged as an emergency staging area for Cornell Ithaca computational resources." Currently the Geneva campus leases two T1 connections adding up to about 3 megabits of bandwidth.

At first there will be a 1 gigabit connection to Rochester to interconnect with the New York state research network NYSERNet. "This offers a redundant path to research networks and the medical school," Vernon explained. Currently the Ithaca campus connects to NYSERNet and the rest of the world only through a fiber-optic link to Syracuse.

In the future, bandwidth on the dark fiber can be greatly expanded by multiplexing several signals at different wavelengths of light over the same fiber, Vernon added.

The new connections should be in operation by May, Vernon said.

Finger Lakes Technologies Group is an Internet service company affiliated with the Ontario & Trumansburg Telephone Companies Inc. Over the last several years it has laid a network of fiber-optic cable roughly paralleling New York Route 96 between Ithaca and Rochester. Plans are to expand eastward to Syracuse and south and west from Ithaca, the company said.