Setting The Standard Packet, Wwp Fiber Test High-Speed Computer Link

Advances come so rapidly now that announcements of new applications of even the most exotic technologies seem commonplace, says Bernard Daines.

But a collaboration of Packet Engines and Washington Water Power Co. to build a high-speed computer network for Spokane-area schools really does represent some of the hottest technology to be found.

“This really is a breakthrough,” says Daines, who is the president and founder of Packet Engines, one of Spokane’s most cutting-edge technology firms.

Packet Engines and WWP Fiber - Washington Water Power’s newest subsidiary - are combining their technological specialties in hopes of winning the bid to construct a Metropolitan Area Network for public education in Spokane.

The project will link all K-12 school districts, the community colleges, Washington State University, Eastern Washington University, Gonzaga University and Whitworth College into a single high-speed computer network.

And that network will give those schools the ability to exchange programs and information and interact with each other more directly than ever before.

The combination of Packet Engine’s gigabit ethernet technology and WWP Fiber’s local fiber optics network would create one of the world’s most advanced networks.

In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the federal government created a $2.25 billion fund to be given to schools and libraries each year nationwide to build networking infrastructure.

The local education entities plan to construct such a network, and are seeking proposals from private companies for the job. In submitting their bids, WWP Fiber and Packet Engines have put together a demonstration of gigabit ethernet technology carrying voice, video and data traffic between WWP’s headquarters on East Mission and WWP Fiber’s offices near downtown.

Located in each office is Packet Engines’ PE-4884 Gigabit Ethernet Routing Switch, which is, says WWP Fiber’s Brian MacLeod, “The fastest routing device on the planet.”

The switch moves data “70 times faster than the devices that run the Internet today,” MacLeod said.

That switch, which only a year ago was just a gleam in Bernard Daines’ fertile imagination, is the heart of Packet Engines.

Daines founded the company in 1995. Having helped construct the technology that drove the first computer networks in the 1980s - which exchanged information at the rate of 10 megabits per second - Daines then was a principal in the company that pushed that speed of exchange to 100 megabits per second in the early 1990s.

He created Packet Engines to build devices that could push the exchange rate to 1,000 megabits - or one gigabit - per second. Now, dozens of companies worldwide are competing with Packet Engines to capture the emerging gigabit ethernet market.

But no one else has anything like the PE-4884 switch. And the link between the two WWP locations is the first demonstration of the switch’s capabilities in a non-laboratory environment.

The capability of moving information among computers at astonishing rates of speed is compromised by the lines linking the computers.

Enter WWP Fiber.

The company is in the business of fiber optics cable, which can carry vastly larger quantities of information in cable bundles that are a fraction of the size of their metal cable counterparts.

WWP Fiber has already installed more than 1,000 strand miles of high-capacity fiber optic cable in the region. That fiber optic network allows the Packet Engines technology to operate at its full potential.

In such a network, the schools involved could run their own digital telephone system, independent of the local phone company.

The schools could also operate a video-on-demand system in which any teacher in any classroom could access a video that would run specifically at the time needed.

“If someone else wants to watch that same video five minutes later, they can get a separate stream fed to them that starts five minutes later,” MacLeod said.

The network could handle state-of-the-art video conferencing.

And it could employ a multicast system in which a lecture is broadcast from one school to any number of the other schools on the system. The lecture could go to whole classrooms, or even to individuals at their desks.

“The advantage over canned video,” Daines said, “is that each individual has the opportunity to interact with the source.”

The demonstration network will be operating through March 6. During that time, WWP Fiber and Packet Engines will host visits from education institutions, commercial customers and community leaders.

Other companies contributing to the demonstration include Netrix, Intel Corp., Picturtel, RADvision, Microsoft, Optivision, Sigma Designs and Televideo Global.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo