Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s CSS Institute on Wednesday announced that it is taking over management of a leading “alternative Internet” used by academics to transmit huge chunks of data.
CSS, also known as the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health, has assumed financial responsibility for the National LambdaRail, a research communications network comprised of more 12,000 miles of high-performance optical fiber capable of speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second. Soon-Shiong’s wife is Michele Chan; the institute was named for their fathers.
The Institute intends to invest more than $100 million to upgrade the network, which Soon-Shiong envisions as the backbone for a national healthcare information infrastructure he has long promoted.
“The CSS-NLR partnership will be truly transformative,” said Soon-Shiong, who has become chairman and chief executive of NLR. “It will serve as a cornerstone of our long-held vision to establish a secure national intranet of health, and a digital infrastructure for continuous improvement in health and health care.”
National LambdaRail, also known as the NLR, was launched in the 1990s by a non-profit coalition of 280 universities and federal laboratories concerned about having sufficient bandwidth for their projects given the growing popularity of the Internet for commercial uses.
Despite CSS’s health care focus, officials say National LambdaRail will still be open to a wide variety of academic and research activity. Users, including the academic institutions that helped build it, currently pay network access fees on top of membership fees.
Institute officials say it is too soon to know whether the fee structure will change to make the network financially self-sustaining. The NLR network has long been a money loser, particularly as cash-strapped public institutions became less able to contribute as much as in the past.
“The NLR is arguably the premier network of its type,” CSS spokesman Bob Peirce said. “What we want to do is improve it and enable it to pay for itself.”
