9306936 Brown Ohio State University requests support from NSF for the connection of the following schools: Columbus State Community College and Southern State Community College to the Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet) which is the NSF mid-level network that serves the State of Ohio. A primary goal of OARnet is to facilitate collaborative projects and sharing of resources between institutions, including those outside the state. OARnet will provide operations management and information services and it will give the six universities a 56 thousand bit per second connection to the NSFNET, a high speed (1.5 - 45 million bits per second) National Backbone network. The universities need greater functionality and network speed to be able to access supercomputers, libraries, and make file transfers along with being able to implement a more reliable mail system. Students and faculty research will benefit from the link. This is also a unique opportunity for the schools to explore innovative educational resources. ***
