The Internet Railroad

Audio and video of performances at the Lincoln Center are being sent live out to the Internet as part of the Internet 1996 World Exposition. We've connected the Lincoln Center to a key global backbone on the Internet using high-speed digital lines and advanced routers to place the Brain Opera in the "center" of the network for two weeks.

Copies of the Brain Opera web site are located around the world in several locations, collectively known as known as Central Park. Users are able to connect to a web server that is "close" to their personal computer. The Brain Opera performance is connected to the Internet Railroad, a high-speed set of telecommunications lines that stretch from Korea to Washington, D.C. Central Park and the Internet Railroad projects represent over $100 million in contributions from industry dedicated to building a public park for the global village.

Bay Networks provides overall project management on the Internet Railroad and has furnished all the key backbone routers in the Lincoln Center, in Washington, D.C., and in other locations on this global backbone system.

NYNEX has contributed a DS3 circuit, running at 45 million bits per second, between the Lincoln Center and New York University.

MCI takes the DS3 circuit from Nynex and extends it down to Washington, D.C., where it joins the Internet Railroad.

MFS Communications provides the high-speed infrastructure that connects the Internet Railroad sites in Washington, D.C. to the key Internet exchange point, known as MAE-East.

IBM Corporation and Sun Microsystems have provided workstations and servers that are used on-site in Lincoln Center and in the key mirror sites around the world, known as Central Park.

Streamworks has provided the Xing Video and Audio encoders that put the audio/video streams onto the Internet computer network as live transmissions.

Sony has provided several experimental cameras that are being used to acquire the video for the network broadcasts.

The Brain Opera is a core project of the Internet 1996 World Exposition, a world's fair for the information age.