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to ArticlesICN Labs™ to Push Limits of Technology
The
Illinois Century Network has taken a leadership role in many aspects of developing
and operating the largest statewide education network in the nation. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in the area of technical expertise, both with new
hardware and adapting technologies to meet the needs of new applications. With
a technical staff that is 100% industry-certified and committed to providing
world-class service for Illinois education, the ICN is often looked to for objective
evaluation and interpretation of networking issues.
The ICN Labs™ is the research and development organization behind many of the ICN's advanced networking services. Technologies are carefully researched and evaluated in ICN Labs™ before they are deployed on the network. Working hand in hand with network vendors to evaluate equipment, ICN staff is able to make well informed purchasing decisions. In anticipation of the dark fiber project, the ICN Network Design and Engineering (NDE) staff put potential equipment from seven manufacturers through a rigorous evaluation process at the ICN's laboratory, a process unheard and unprecedented in terms of size and scope in the industry.
The ICN also has the distinction of being the first statewide network to become fully multicast enabled. When the ICN needed to test the multicast network, software had to be developed that would easily generate and receive multicast data. The resulting application was functional but unrefined. Rather than keeping this tool "in house" the ICN made this software available to the world as open source software under the name Mint. The result was a sophisticated IP multicast testing utility started by the ICN, enhanced by researchers around the world, and distributed freely under the same license as Linux. Mint has become popular among ISPs, satellite data distribution networks, and network engineers supporting multicast around the world. It has been downloaded over 400 times. To learn more about Mint, and the ICN's involvement in open source software please visit http://mc-mint.sourceforge.net.