Lead by Northeast Cooperatives Director of Information Technoloy, Lyle MacVey, in 2001 the Northeast Network went into full operation servicing school districts and public libraries throughout NE MN. The network offered state of the art ATM switching within its OC3 fiber network core. In addition, it was the first to offer H.323 Video Telepresence solution within the State of MN. Internet connections were upgraded from 56k frame relays to full T1 service. It was heralded as major milestone for education and libraries and setup the future for education.
From a later grant leveraging this initial infrastructure build…
“The existing NESC Network (NortheastNET) has been deemed adequate for the expanded video traffic.
NESC is unique in that we are the only cooperative regional educational network operating as a certified competitive local exchange carrier in the State of MN. We operate both as a service provider and recipient under the Federal E-Rate program. We are registered with the State of MN Department of Commerce to provide local and long distance phone service. We provide wire line and IP based phone service to our regional educational connected entities. We do not provide services to private consumer or commercial entities. As a result, we are able to access wholesale service rates that are not available to even state agencies such as the State of MN Office of Enterprise Technology (OET).
In 1999, the northeastern MN network was operated by the Arrowhead Regional Computing Consortium. The network primarily of a hub and spoke 56kbps frame relay and T1 (1.5Mbps) frame relay data network. Through the use of the Federal E-Rate program a new network was created under the Northeast Service Cooperative and the old network was retired.
NortheastNET was designed using an ATM based OC-3 (155Mbps) core and distributed points of presence allowing large reduction in our long haul network costs. The network is a fully redundant Sonet ring with points of presence located in Duluth, Virginia, Hibbing and Grand Rapids. The old frame relay network was fully replaced with a point to point T1 last mile loop that improved performance and allowed for controlled quality of service (QOS). This allowed older H.320 ISDN video network to be replace with the latest H.323 IP based video technology. We were the first in MN to widely adopt IP-Based H.323 video, the rest of the State followed our example over the next few years.”