Recommendations for External Network Access

The amount of information becoming available on the Internet is astounding, and continues to grow at a rapid pace. Many researchers make routine use of the Internet on a daily basis, and exchange increasingly large amounts of information with various parties. UMBC already has a ``presence'' on the Internet that advertises our campus to the world. We need to carefully manage this presence, and make networked information transfer both in and out of UMBC as easy and cheap as possible. Our recommendations include:

• Faculty must be able to effectively access UMBC's computing resources from off-campus. UMBC should provide SLIP (or equivalent) access to all faculty and appropriate support staff. (ACS has recently starting providing TIA access to UMBC networks using modem connections, which is a SLIP ``equivalent''.) These relatively low-cost facilities will allow faculty to learn about network computing at home, where they are more likely to have the time required to learn the skills needed to effectively use new ITT technologies. Network access from home at night can sometimes be much faster than during the day when some databases, networks are extremely busy. The lack of adequate numbers of dial-in modems is a continuing problem for faculty who work at night at home. This is probably the best time of the day for busy faculty to learn about ITT.

• UMBC researchers will continually need ever higher speed access to data at other locations. High speed access to regional government and industry locations, where faculty often collaborate, may drive these high end requirements. For example, in the next several years researchers in Geography (2--3 faculty), Physics (2 faculty), Computer Science (3-4 faculty), Electrical Engineering, and possibly others will need high speed access massive amounts of NASA Global Change Data. Biomedical researchers will need access to image databases, DNA databases, etc. Researchers in the social sciences and humanities will increasingly want access to archives of digitally stored original material (slide/art archives), the many governmental databases (census materials, etc.) and so on. The key problem is that many of these databases are growing rapidly in size and require high-speed connections for access.

• In the next 5 years, UMBC may be faced with the prospect that the average home will have orders of magnitude more network bandwidth access per person than UMBC. We need to monitor closely our need for external bandwidth and have plans for increasing this bandwidth. We need to make a strong case to the UM system for vastly increased bandwidth between UM campuses and the outside world. The committee has asked Jack Suess to explore the possibility of UMBC acquiring Internet access independently from UM System. UMBC's Internet access should be roughly 1/3 the bandwidth of UMCP's bandwidth, which is expected to be in the 145 Mbit/sec range in the next several years. UMBC presently has a 1 Mbit/sec link to the Internet.