such institutions without direct agency involvement. For example, state initiatives in Texas and 

 North Carolina proceed with little or no Federal funding or involvement. 



Traffic on the NSFNET backbone has doubled over the past year, and has increased a hundred-fold 

 since 1988. Improvements and upgrades to the network made by NSF have kept pace with the 

 increased traffic and have advanced the state of network technology and operations. 



ARFA, DOE, NASA, and NSF provide international connectivity to the Pacific Rim, Europe, Japan, 

 United Kingdom, South America, China, and the former Soviet Union, for mission-specific scientific 

 collaborations and general research and education infrastructure requirements. These links are of 

 varying speeds, with many of the larger "fat pipes" cost-shared and co-managed by agencies requiring 

 high speed connectivity. 



Schematic of the interconnected "backbone" networks of NSF. NASA, and DOE, together with selected client 

 regional and other networks. The backbone topology is shown on a plane above the outline of the U.S. Line seg- 

 ments connect backbone nodes with geographic locations where client networks attach. 



Procurement of Fast Packet Services 



The need for advanced networking services has been driven by the requirements of distributed scien- 

 tific visualization and remote experiment control, and more recently by the phenomenal growth of 

 multimedia applications. In order to satisfy these needs, DOE and NASA are in the process of jointly 

 acquiring fast packet services based on new telecommunications industry-provided services (for 



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