Delivering advanced broadband communications of fully interactive voice, data and video to over 1.4 million users, NWV is a nationally recognized model for public/private partnerships to develop advanced communications infrastructure. Businesses, schools, libraries, municipalities, and government agencies throughout the Commonwealth have access to low-cost, advanced network services. NWV was spearheaded by Virginia Tech and build by private industry. It continues to receive rapid technology refreshment through a unique public-private partership between the involved providers and the University.

Virginia Tech is providing leadership for a mid-Atlantic region, multiuniversity consortium to establish optical infrastructure for the next generation of high performance, "Cyberinfrastructure," including support for emerging Grid technology. NWV Next Generation gigaPOP is the gateway to Internet2's Abilene, the advanced network backbone, supporting new high-speed Internet applications and other national and international research networks.

More than a decade ago, Virginia Tech and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) joined the town of Blacksburg to pioneer what became a national prototype for community networks. Today, BEV’s wide array of community, commercial, and government services are used by nearly 90% of the town’s residents, and BEV is helping other locales build innovative community networks.

These organizations support Virginia Tech’s faculty in developing on-line, technologically integrated courses. Since 1993, Virginia Tech has assisted almost 100% of its faculty in integrating technology across the curriculum, winning the university national recognition as a leader in instructional technology.

This massive complex is at the core of Virginia Tech’s efforts to apply research in computing, information, and communications technology to real-world needs. The ACITC features a digital library, electronic reading room, virtual-reality classroom, and comprehensively equipped laboratories. Multiple parallel clusters, high-end servers and workstations, and miles of fiber and copper cable are available for cutting-edge research in real-time graphics, networking, visualization, data mining, parallel algorthims, materials science, and more.

Researchers once illustrated projects after research was completed. Today, UVAG’s CAVE Automated Virtual Environment (The CAVE™) enables university and corporate users to integrate visualization with the actual discovery process. Users personally or remotely access the room-sized, high-resolution, 3-D video-audio theatre with motion platform, studying a wide array of IT and engineering applications before investing time and money.