Suppose you'd been living in America for the last 15 years and just found out who Hillary Clinton is. That's the way I feel about National LambdaRail. I've been moving around in the tech and education worlds for a long time, but I'd never heard of this. I'm suffering from a sense of "how could I not know about this?"

I read a press release from the National Navajo Tribal Council. Press releases from the Native American nations in New Mexico where I live are commonplace, that wasn't what caught my eye. The press release was about something called the Internet to the Hogans program and mentioned a type of Internet called National LambdaRail.

Council Delegate Leonard Tsosie Convened the 10th Internet to the Hogans meeting featuring The National Lambda Rail Agreement between the University of New Mexico and Navajo Technical College.

The Navajo Technical College is in Crownpoint, about 170 miles northwest of Albuquerque where UNM is located. Crownpoint is surrounded by mountains and has limited access to telecommunications services. The article explained that The National LambdaRail Agreement gave Crownpoint access to a second Internet system that runs parallel to the well-known World Wide Web.

As I began looking around for for information about this, I was reminded that the World Wide Web is not the Internet. It's merely a piece of the Internet. We see a public, well-known and commercial side of the Internet on the WWW. But there is a lot going on behind that screen.

The National LambdaRail website lists a huge number of participants, all universities. It describes its mission as,

National LambdaRail is advancing the research, clinical, and educational goals of members and other institutions by establishing and maintaining a unique nationwide network infrastructure that is owned and controlled by the U.S. research community.

The description of what National LambdaRail is all about at the site is pretty technical. It was built from the ground up using fiber optics. So I turned to Wikipedia in hopes of clarification.

National LambdaRail is a high-speed national computer network in the United States that runs over fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental Ethernet network. The name is shared by the organization of research institutions that developed the network, and, to date, plans to continue developing it. LambdaRail is similar to the Abilene Network, but LambdaRail permits deeper experimentation than Abilene does.

It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts, but is also not intended to be a service network, but to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next-generation large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the network for these research projects.

I'd knew of Internet2, another university based high-speed, fiber optic network, so that news wasn't a shock. I learned that the Abilene Network is a creation of Internet2 with over 220 educational institutions parrticpating.

All three networks are used by universities for research and have corporate sponsors such as Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Comcast. Are there other networks that run parallel to the World Wide Web?

There are several military based networks running parallel to the WWW. In an article about the history of the Internet, Wikipedia mentions the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), the secret-level SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) and JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System) for top secret and above.

I tried searching on a number of different terms and couldn't find any other parallel networks. I don't think I was using the proper keywords, because I didn't even find the networks I talked about above by searching, nor did I find any that I haven't already mentioned. Are there more? I'd like to know.