Pentagon will spend $15B to lower bandwidth cost.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The Defense Department is seeking to lower the cost of band width, at a time when the military services are under great pressure to improve their networking capabilities on the battlefield.

Although the cost of bandwidth in the civilian sector has dropped considerably, the Pentagon continues to struggle to provide enough pipes for users across the globe.

The Pentagon intends to spend about $15 billion during the next several years to considerably bring down the cost of bandwidth, said John Stenbit, the Defense Department's former chief information officer:

He said the long term plan is to make the entire Defense Department operate on Internet-based protocols.

"I need to make bandwidth cheap all over, or I can't go to an internet based system," Stenbit said at an aerospace conference in Singapore.

A key development in Stenbit's plan is the deployment next year of the global information grid bandwidth expansion (GIG BE) program. GIG-BE is a switched optical network that will serve Defense Department users at 100 sites around the world.

This network will deliver data-transfer speeds of 10 megabits per second, of faster: Science Applications International Cot potation is the prime contractor for the GIG-BE program. Overseeing the project is the Defense Information Systems Agency.

GIG-BE is one of a cluster of programs designed to facilitate inter operability and a full net-centric force. Others include...