Level 3 Communications chose the NxtComm show to announce today that it has turned up a 100 Gigabit 13,500-mile academic and research network that was contracted last year by the Internet 2 education and research community.

“There are all kinds of experiments that will be put on top of this,” said Randy Dunbar, Level 3 senior vice president of offer management. “It will be very cutting edge, and we will be pushing the network further than before.”

Internet 2 projects often involve interconnecting supercomputers, electron microscopes and super-colliders at high-bandwidth for limited time periods, Dunbar said. To better support such projects, the new network will let community members re-provision bandwidth for themselves as needed.

The traffic currently carried on the Abilene network, the original network commissioned by the Internet 2 community, will also be moved to the new Level 3 network, Dunbar said.