DOD awards $50 million to industry, universities for Next Generation Internet

By John Monroe

| April 13, 1998

The Defense Department today announced it would spend $50 million over the next three years to fund privatesector research into technology that will support the government's Next Generation Internet initiative.

The Defense Department today announced it would spend $50 million over the next three years to fund private-sector research into technology that will support the government's Next Generation Internet initiative.

NGI is a research and development program aimed at developing network technology capable of transmitting data at rates that are 100 to 1,000 times faster than today's Internet. DOD, the Energy Department and NASA are leading the NGI initiative.

For its segment of the program, DOD has chosen to fund 27 technology proposals from industry and the university community, with each award worth between $200,000 and $5 million. Research areas include ultrafast optical crossconnect switches, modeling and simulation and an architecture combining Internet protocols with wavelength division multiplexing technology.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is overseeing DOD's program, and many of the technologies will be deployed on DARPA's wide-area experimental test bed called SuperNet.

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The Defense Department today announced it would spend $50 million over the next three years to fund privatesector research into technology that will support the government's Next Generation Internet initiative.