AREN Core Infrastructure

The Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN) has brought Internet connectivity to schools, universities, libraries, government entities, and other institutions in Alabama since the early 1990s. In the early days, AREN was able to serve all clients with a single T1 (1.5Mbps) connection to the Internet. This provided access for email and the World Wide Web (WWW), which were just becoming popular.

With each year came new developments in technology. As needs grew, so did AREN. Today, email and WWW are household terms. Technologies such as multimedia streaming are taking center stage; and once again AREN is growing to meet the need.

Over the past few years AREN's Internet capacity has increased to a combined 2.6Gbps, and AREN has installed a faster more robust statewide backbone.

Internet

As mentioned earlier, AREN started with a single T1 connection to the Internet. In the past twelve years, to ensure continued excellent performance for AREN clients, AREN's Internet access has grown from 1.5Mbps to 2.6Gbps with connections in Huntsville (500Mbps), Birmingham (500Mbps), Montgomery (500Mbps), Mobile (100Mbps), and Atlanta (1Gbps).

Statewide Backbone

The AREN backbone consists of one 10-Gigabit Ethernet connection, two Gigabit Ethernet connections and two OC3 (155Mbps) connections in a two-ring design. The three Ethernet connections form the northern ring between Huntsville, Birmingham, and Montgomery (the 10-Gig is between Huntsville and Birmingham). Two additional OC3 connections form the southern loop by connecting Mobile to both Birmingham and Montgomery.

This resilient ring design is significant for many reasons, including Internet failover, faster in-state connectivity, and reliable transport.

Consider the following scenarios:

  1. If the Internet connection in Birmingham fails, the backbone provides a life-line to the other Internet connections in Huntsville, Montgomery, and Mobile.
  2. The Governor's distance learning initiative is allowing K-12 students across the state to take courses from teachers in other parts of the state using AREN. The bandwidth of the backbone allows all of AREN's clients a great deal of capacity for in-state traffic. The backbone fully supports the Quality of Service (QoS) technology needed to provide good voice and video connections for K-12 and other clients on the network.
  3. The backbone takes three separate failures to isolate Birmingham or Montgomery. Likewise, it will take two separate failures to isolate Huntsville or Mobile. Looking at it another way, if all of our Birmingham circuits go down, Huntsville, Montgomery, and Mobile will still be able to communicate. This is much improved compared to previously, when a single cut would separate the statewide network into two isolated islands, and a complete outage in Birmingham would leave Huntsville and North Alabama isolated.

As you can see, the statewide backbone has many benefits.

From 1.5Mbps to 2.6Gbps, AREN has come a long way since the original T1 connection to the Internet. Today, any one of AREN's four Internet connections alone accounts for more bandwidth than the entire original AREN infrastructure. AREN continues to provide quality Internet and networking services for all clients, whether sending an email or using live video to take high school physics.

If you are an AREN client and would like more details about our core infrastructure, please contact one of our engineers. You can reach us by calling the helpdesk at 1-800-338-8320 or emailing us at helpdesk@asc.edu. If you would like more information about how to connect to AREN, please call 256.971.7400.