What is KyRON?
Expanding on the Kentucky Postsecondary Education Network (KPEN) established in 1998, the Kentucky Regional Optical Network (KyRON) is the next generation network for Kentucky’s postsecondary education community. KyRON’s new optical network technology enables it to scale to meet the education community’s ever-growing network demands for bandwidth and high performance at a reasonable cost.
KyRON enables the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville to qualify for major federal research grants and reach their goals of being a top 20 major comprehensive research institution and a premier, nationally-recognized metropolitan research university.
KyRON serves as the connector and the sponsor for the Kentucky P-20 education community to Internet2, a high-performance, high-bandwidth national network specifically dedicated to research and education. Internet2 also provides unique opportunities for worldwide collaboration in teaching, learning, and research in ways not possible on today’s Internet.
KyRON provides application, training and support services that enable educators to better utilize the network and integrate applications to improve teaching and learning. KyRON brings advanced networking resources into Kentucky classrooms or wherever teaching, learning, and research occur.
Who are KyRON’s initial members?
The University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky, and the Council on Postsecondary Education are the initial members of KyRON. The membership will expand to include the remainder of the education community when their connections to KyRON are established.
When is this happening?
The Louisville optical switching node, one of only 26 nodes in the U.S. for the new Internet2 national backbone, became operational in April 2007. The University of Louisville completed a fiber link into the new network through this node in May 2007. The University of Kentucky will connect in spring 2008. The remainder of the Kentucky education community, whose access to Internet2 is sponsored by UK, plans to connect by July 2012.
How does KyRON benefit Kentucky?
KyRON acts as the sponsor for the Internet2 Sponsored Education Group Participants (SEGP) to extend access for non-profit organizations such as museums, libraries, art galleries, government, and hospitals. For-profit organizations in partnership with an existing member can also participate.
Internet2 and KyRON support collaboration between education, government, health care and other organizations through resource sharing, access to digital libraries, interactive video-conferencing, remote instrumentation, high-speed data services, and other capabilities. These are vital tools in helping Kentucky compete in the global information economy.
The high speeds of KyRON make possible new collaborations such as data backup, disaster recovery and remote data centers.
As KyRON requires the telecommunications companies to install advanced technologies on their networks, the infrastructure will benefit Kentucky’s business communities.