'The benefits of an all optical fiber infrastructure are critically important for these types of networks,' Meena said. Leveraging its 8,600 route miles of high-capacity fiber optic infrastructure, C Spire has designed the network to support direct collaboration for the first time among the state's research universities and regional institutions as well as access to resources in the ITS State Data Center and C Spire data centers in Jackson and Starkville. 'This is a world-class network that fully supports MissiON's important research objectives now and well into the future and saves taxpayers millions of dollars.' 'We've boosted aggregate total bandwidth by more than 380 percent while reducing the overall cost by over 50 percent annually,' Meena added. 'As Mississippi's leading broadband communications provider, C Spire is proud to provide innovative, leading-edge technology and the latest fiber optic infrastructure to help power the important work of the MissiON network and enable researchers to pursue comprehensive solutions to 21 st century challenges,' said CEO Hu Meena. Army Corp of Engineers' Engineering Research and Development Center and the national Internet 2 consortium.įour regional universities – Delta State, Alcorn State, Mississippi University for Women and Mississippi Valley State – are being added to the MissiON network for the first time under a new state telecommunications contract awarded to C Spire earlier this year by the Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services (ITS).Īs part of the comprehensive upgrade, C Spire boosted bandwidth speeds up to 10 times faster for consortium partners, lowered overall latency, added a new interconnection with Internet 2, built new route diversity and redundancy to ensure optimal MissiON network uptime and eliminated a single point of failure from the previous network. C Spire, selected last fall by the state to replace AT&T, completed the work in record time.Ĭ Spire is turning up the enhanced connections for the research arms at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Mississippi State, Jackson State, the University of Southern Mississippi, Stennis Space Center, the U.S. A recent infrastructure overhaul of the Mississippi Optical Network, which supports the state's university science and technology research efforts, has tripled capacity and lowered operating costs while doubling the number of schools in the consortium.

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