Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio (August 14, 2006) - OneCommunity and Ohio Supercomputer Center’s networking division (OARnet) announced today a definitive agreement to connect two of the nation’s largest and fastest digital networks, serving as a strong competitive advantage for Ohio. This partnership improves access to advanced technology services, brings new capabilities to researchers throughout the state, and prompts increased collaboration among our universities, healthcare institutions, researchers and others in Northeast Ohio and across the State.
Under the new arrangement, subscribers to OneCommunity’s ultra broadband community network serving Northeast Ohio will also have ready access to the OSCnet, OARnet's high-speed statewide fiber network, extending their collaborative regional community intranet to other institutions throughout Ohio. Members of the two networks can now enjoy transmission speeds and capacity of up to 1 gigabyte per second, or more than 600 times that of a traditional business connection. So as an example, researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati can now cost effectively leverage these next generation technologies as a platform for collaboration and innovation.
“The collaboration between OARnet and OneCommunity brings together two leading examples of how Ohio is moving ahead in the information age,” said Frank E. Samuel, Jr., Science and Technology Advisor to Ohio Governor Bob Taft. “By bringing together OneCommunity’s world-class regional network with our outstanding Third Frontier Network, we are providing a template for how all of Ohio can take advantage of these next generation broadband networks and develop applications to accelerate research, enhance educational offerings and foster economic development through innovation and commercialization.”
The new agreement will help lower overall IT costs by allowing OneCommunity, OARnet and their subscribers to share resources and services. Shared applications and services provided by member institutions and their partners include distance learning tools, high definition videoconferencing capabilities, and data intensive applications such as sharing medical records, supercomputing or disaster recovery resources.
“Many of our members on the OneCommunity network have relationships with organizations and institutions throughout Ohio,” said Scot Rourke, president of OneCommunity. “By helping our members to connect seamlessly to sites on the Third Frontier Network, we will enable them to be more effective, it will foster new collaborations and accelerate the transformation of the region as a technology innovator and leader.”
In addition to having statewide intranet access to all of the State’s higher education and research institutions on the Third Frontier Network, OneCommunity’s members will also have seamless access to OSC’s high performance computing, networking, and research resources. Members will now directly connect to Internet2, a national research network dedicated to next generation Internet applications.
"The state network will provide immediate benefits to Northeast Ohio’s research, health and education community by providing shared classroom learning experiences, better access to digital libraries, and shared instrumentation," said Stan Ahalt, executive director of OSC. “For example, this agreement will assist ongoing collaborations between medical schools on network-based visualizations of medical data.”
OARnet’s subscribers will use OneCommunity’s regional network to connect to its health, education, government and cultural institution members.
