(October 20, 2014)

One day, as I surfed the web on my laptop and lamented how long it takes a YouTube video to load, I found myself wondering if employees of the US government — DoD researchers, DoE scientists, CIA spies — are also beholden to the same congestion and shoddy peering that affects everyone else on the internet. Surely, as hundreds of scientists at Fermi Lab near Chicago wait for petabytes of raw data to arrive from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, they don‘t suffer interminable connection drops and inexplicable lag. And, as it turns out, they don‘t: the US government and its national laboratories all have exclusive access to ESnet — a shadow internet that can sustain 100-gigabits-per-second transfers between any of the major Department of Energy labs. And today, the DoE announced that the 100-gigabit ESnet will be extended across the Atlantic to our Old World comrades, who occasionally manage to dazzle us with their scientific endeavors.