OmniPoP

OmniPoP is a network collaboration between the Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions, providing high speed connectivity between campuses and research hubs worldwide. It knits together regional optical networks on a collectively owned fiber cable circling downtown Chicago. Current OmniPoP partners and affiliates are listed on their website.

Benefits

Benefits of OmniPoP include:

  • Multiple access points for researchers
  • Redundancy to eliminate network downtime
  • Sharing of bandwidth-intensive applications
  • Large research datasets for regional, national, or global collaboration. 
  • Ultra-high bandwidth connections to higher education and research peers which reduce costs and latency.

Connections

The University of Michigan has two 100 Gbps connections to OmniPoP via the Michigan Innovation Network (MiNet). These connections are redundant and diversely routed to provide high availability.