Take a deep breath...the next 7 months

If you have an inquisitive mind, you're probably wondering how we'll transition between the two networks while still maintaining the day-to-day production connectivity the Abilene connectors have grown to love so much. I'm happy to share a set of 9 diagrams that show the network through it's various phases of evolution. I should add that this is the current plan and is subject to change as new dependencies crop up.

Phase 1 is complete! The router in Chicago is our old lab router from North Carolina and the router in New York is a loaner from Juniper:


Phase II will happen in January, once we transition networks off our Indianapolis router. That will free up a third "floating" router since Indianapolis doesn't get a router in the new network. (We're all a little sad in Indy to see our T640 go away, but these sorts of things happen) We'll have moved everyone off the old New York router, so we'll carry it up the 10 flights of stairs- or use the freight elevator, whichever is easier- to replace the temporary Juniper loaner router:

Phase 3 will see the completion of the next major round of Level3 routes in early March. By then, we'll have connectors transitioned off the old Chicago T640 and will have moved it to Atlanta:


Phase 4 will see the movement of the old Atlanta and Washington DC routers to Kansas City and Houston, respectively:


Phase 5 will see the turnup of the new Salt Lake City router after we move the old Kansas City router connectors off their node. This will pave the way to transit Denver networks:



Phase 6 will see the movement of the Houston node to Seattle:

Phase 7 brings a close to the turnup of the new backbone with the old Denver node moving to Los Angeles:



The final Phase brings a transition of networks off the Los Angeles and Sunnyvale nodes and their de-install: