Ohio University has now officially joined the Abilene consortium in conjunction with the other Internet 2 universities in Ohio. OARnet has activated a permanent virtual connection (PVC) from Ohio University into the Abilene backbone. Thus all communications to and from other Internet 2 sites should now be automatically routed across the Abilene backbone, dramatically improving throughput and response time. We have confirmed that traffic is flowing across this PVC. Of course, bottlenecks in Internet 1 performance remain an issue.

OARnet no longer operates a connection to the vBNS backbone. However, there is a strong peering relationship between Abilene and vBNS. Thus OARnet engineers predict no problems with passing data from Ohio University to vBNS sites across the country.