This award enables four independent liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith) to connect to NSFNET through a fractional T1 link (one-third T1, approximately 500,000 bits per second) to the mid-level network NEARnet, the New England Academic and Research Network. Access to NSFNET provides the faculty and students of the four colleges with increased opportunity for collaboration and use of a wide range of research tools such as supercomputing and shared databases. Five Colleges, Inc., consists of the four colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Responsibility for network operations and management is assumed by the computing centers of the participating colleges, each of which has established campus- wide local area networks. The new connectivity vastly improves the file transfer and remote login capabilities between these four institutions themselves, and with other institutions.
