Yesterday’s announcement that ESNet is buying into the National LambdaRail as its backbone provider of the future is excellent news, but not exactly a surprise. More than ever, national laboratories and academic research communities need to collaborate, and making sure that they share a common network fabric in the future will certainly help facilitate that. This hookup has been coming for a while, though. Suggestions in this direction have been showing up in DOE slideshows since 2002 at least. The DOE Network Roadmap (late 2003) notes that “As NLR evolves, it will be important for ESnet to interface with the services running on NLR, as many of the users of Office of Science facilities are located at universities, and these users will use these high end services as their method of moving terabyte/petabyte-scale volumes of data to and from ESnet.” Bill Johnston’s reviews of ESNet in early 2004 (e.g. here) make connecting ESNet and NLR a critical near term goal. As usual, big data sets (e.g. LHC experiments at CERN) pull this train.

NetworkWorld has published the transcript of a grid computing panel discussion among leaders from various commercial vendors, including IBM and Cisco. While the discussion has an obvious commercial slant, some interesting thoughts and opinions about the pros and cons of grid computing are shared by some of the leading players. Some of the responses to the moderator questions truly expose the position of some vendors, which may or may not be common knowledge.

The Tallahassee Democrat (of all places) brings word of an attempt to stymie Florida municipalities’ efforts to build public broadband and wi-fi networks. According to the story:

The bill would stop local governments already in the communications business from acquiring new customers until certain steps had been taken.

It would bar cities…from acquiring new customers for existing systems and make any other city go through a lengthy review process before it could start broadband or Internet service.

(Hat tip to Slashdot)

A similar effort is underway in Indiana, the Indianapolis Star reported on February 1. In that story it’s a clash of the titans, lobbyist vs. consultant:

“What’s the right approach?” said Mike Marker, a lobbyist for SBC. “For cities and towns to partner with private companies? Or to create public subsidies so that cities and towns can get into the risky business of telecommunications?”

While the bill has received little public attention, it could have broad ramifications for consumers. Critics say the bill would…virtually eliminate the only real option that some rural towns have to move beyond sluggish, dial-up access to the Internet.

“If people don’t have these services, then these communities fall behind economically,” said Bunnie Riedel, a Maryland-based consultant who often represents municipalities on cable and telecom issues.