OSHEAN’s Third Generation Beacon Network

Over 25 years and three major technology generations, OSHEAN’s 700+ mile Beacon network has become a cornerstone of our region’s Community Anchor Institution (CAI) critical infrastructure.  The first few years utilized a mixture of circuits and centralized routing.  Next came the $32M Federal BTOP grant which brought a build of dedicated fiber infrastructure and a sophisticated MPLS backbone.  Now, with major expansion of the topology, feeds and speeds and the complete upgrade of the packet layer to Segment Routing and EVPN, the Beacon network has become one of the finest examples of cutting-edge innovation in our industry. 

OSHEAN connects over 160 members including all of Rhode Island’s higher education and several in MA, RI’s largest state health care organizations, a large majority of the States K12 schools and libraries and a significant portion of RI’s State Government.  The OSHEAN membership enjoys the security, performance and flexibility of a private network infrastructure within a regional collaborative as well as global internetworking through multiple IP gateways.   

The Beacon middle-mile core network is a private, 48 strand optical network.  Strands can be offered as lit or dark services and configured in either point-to-point, point to multipoint or fully meshed topologies. 

Technology Platform and Resilience 

The Beacon network is a state-of-the-art optical platform built on Cisco’s 15454 Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) systems and Network Convergence System (NCS).  The power of this network enables OSHEAN to offer cutting-edge transport and IP services to Members at greater speeds and lower cost than other providers.  The Network is designed with a highly resilient multi-layer architecture.  The network infrastructure is best described as a Segment Routed (SR), EVPN meshed architecture with multiple and diverse BGP routes, to and from, core nodes. The meshed topology affords many options for data traffic seeking alternate routes and ensures no single point of failure.  The fault tolerant design, with 50 millisecond (ms) optical path failover, adds a layer of redundancy required to meet the most demanding network Service Level Agreements (SLA’s).  The Beacon network leverages advancements in DWDM technology to meet the future needs of networking capacity and bandwidth.  Today, OSHEAN is able to multiplex 40 DWDM wavelengths (each capable of 400Gbit) on a single pair of fiber.  With 24 pairs of fiber strands available, that equates to a bandwidth pipes totaling hundreds of Terabytes. 

Beacon “Lit Services” provides members with Ethernet port interface(s) to fit a variety of packet switched networking applications – including bridging of distant local area networks or creating high-speed gateways to the public internet.  Internetworking this large amount of data is achieved by the use of WAN Segment Routing and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing.  After 25 years, WAN MPLS has retired to the much simpler and scalable SR technique which is more conducive to application specific domains and evolving network perimeters.  By design, Beacon is designed to reduce latency across the network, ease provisioning and maintenance and improve user experience particularly with bandwidth intensive applications.  In addition, Beacon maintains multiple vendors peering points with commodity Internet suppliers and employs BGP routing at the network’s edges.  This comprehensive infrastructure allows OSHEAN members to aggregate multiple network services in a consistent way, be it site-to-site, site to partner, commodity internet, or “ON-NET” cloud offerings.  This technology also allows virtual private instances to exist and be managed within the framework.  We have architected a network fabric that enables members to coexist and share resources even while maintaining separate management domains and partitioned bandwidth.   

Internet Services 

OSHEAN provides our members access to the commodity Internet, major brand Content Distribution networks and access to the Internet2 national and international research network.  Internet Access service is provided via OSHEAN’s diversely located aggregation facilities and utilizes redundant core routers and redundant upstream Internet Service Provider (ISP) connections to provide enhanced capacity and reliability.    

A few of the key features of OSHEAN’s unparalleled Internet Service that sets us apart from other providers: 

• Bandwidth to the internet is treated as a pool for the member as an entity and is not charged per site.  Therefore, the member can allocate BW to sites as it sees fit and can provide access from multiple sites at no additional charge. 

• OSHEAN’s Internet Services allow a 50% constant burst over the subscription rate thereby reducing the committed rate requirement and smoothing transitions. 

• OSHEAN provides unmetered access to Internet2 advanced layer 2 and 3 services including a fully functional Cloud Exchange. This is exclusive to OSHEAN in Rhode Island. 

• The Internet 2 Cloud Exchange brings the major cloud hubs in Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas and Santa Clara for direct access to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and many other major application providers. 

• CDN Private Peering accounts for approximately 20-40% of traffic that would typically route over the commercial Internet.  However, OSHEAN has the ability to keep this traffic “On-Net” for better performance and cost savings.  This traffic is unmetered and is not charged against your subscription rate.  

• Beacon provides secondary and tertiary ISP peering sessions in different cities for a DR/Secondary Site functionality at full subscription rate at no additional charge.  

Security – Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection 

OSHEAN has developed a powerful protection layer, for all members using the Beacon network, for the recognition and mitigation of Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.  This service protects all members from volumetric attacks and has been responsible for hundreds of mitigations since inception 6 years ago.  It is fully automated and requires no intervention from the member. This functionality is an integral part of the Beacon service and is free of charge.