CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

The Times-Picayune By Robert Travis Scott BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Kathleen Blanco surprised participants at an information-technology research conference Thursday by announcing that the state will spend $40 million to link Louisiana universities to a high-speed fiber-optic communications network. The investment in the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative will put Louisiana at the forefront of the "knowledge economy" and will help attract new research dollars and faculty, Blanco said. University officials originally were looking for $20 million to $25 million from the state, said Brian Ropers-Huilman, manager of high-performance computing and computation at Louisiana State University's Center for Computation & Technology. Blanco's announcement at a LONI forum came as a surprise to nearly everyone involved in the project, he said. Through the state Board of Regents, the state will commit $4 million per year for 10 years. The money will pay to establish and maintain the new network, including some staff positions to manage it. Eight universities will be linked initially, beginning probably as early as April. These include Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Tulane University, University of New Orleans, the LSU Health Sciences Centers in Shreveport and New Orleans, Southern University, University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Louisiana Tech. Louisiana universities will be able to tap into an fiber-optic network known as the National Lambda Rail, which links research centers in many states. The Board of Regents committed $5 million to that project, and the Lambda node for Louisiana will be ready in April. The LONI system will connect the state schools to that Lambda rail. A home computer might be connected to a cable modem delivering information at 1 megabit per second, compared to university researchers in the state who currently share a bandwidth delivering 30 megabits per second. The LONI system will be more than a thousand times faster, offering 40 gigabits per second, said Gabrielle Allen, assistant director for computing applications at the Center for Computation & Technology. About 20 states have a LONI-type system, she said. Most of the lines for LONI already are in place. In the late 1990s, telecommunications companies invested heavily in laying fiber-optic lines, with the result that far more communications capacity was available than was being used. LONI will utilize some of this unused capacity, or "dark fiber," probably through leases from the companies that own the lines, said Charlie McMahon, director of LSU's Office of Telecommunications. The universities will not sell access to businesses, but companies can conduct collaborative research with the schools, McMahon said. The universities will not compete with private telecommunications services, he said. Michael Abbiatti, associate commissioner for information and learning technology for the board of regents, said the $40 million will allow the universities to fulfill their most ambitious plans for the research system. State officials said the research through LONI could result in inventions that could spin off jobs for Louisiana.