VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[kgenus]

It's tough knowing one of your clients is trying to meet a three year deadline to implement new technologies and you can't talk about it at all. Thanks to Forbes, the cat is somewhat out of the bag. The reason certain telecom companies have made ISDN almost impossible to get is due to Internet2. The bandwidth is nothing short of monstrous and the applications running on the network are realtime. It's a completely different topology and many of the connectivity problems we have today can not be applied to this resource, what's new is old. Read on.



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Next-Generation Networks

Consortium Builds Next-Generation Net

David M. Ewalt, 04.04.05, 6:00 AM ET



NEW YORK - The next generation of Internet networks isn't being dreamed up at Bill Gates' mountain retreat, pondered inside a corporate boardroom or sketched out in a basement research lab. It's already been built by a consortium that includes 207 universities, along with private and public research labs and government agencies. It's called Internet2, and it works like a test kitchen for tomorrow's networking innovations.



Internet2 is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1996 for the purpose of developing advanced networking technologies. It serves as an information clearing house, facilitating the exchange of research between members and allowing them to co-develop new bits of hardware and software.



"For a lot of these organizations, having a way to work with leading edge networks gives them an ability to sort of live in the future," says Internet2 Chief Executive Officer Doug Van Houweling. "If you really want to test what can be done, we provide an opportunity to do that."



Instrumental in that mission is Abilene, the consortium's private network. The most advanced research and education network in the United States, it connects member institutions at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, roughly 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. Four million users--mostly students, researchers and professors--use it to share information and test high-bandwidth applications that just couldn't run over the commercial internet.



Some of these applications are ones you might already use, like videoconferencing. But Abilene's users have such a high-quality connection that they don't have to deal with the shakes, jitters, slowness and errors common in existing commercial products, which opens up all kinds of new uses. Miami's New World Symphony uses Abilene to teach music classes to students. The connection provides enough clarity that it sounds like the student and teacher are in the same room, allowing instructors to identify wrong notes with the certainty that it isn't just a bad connection.



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Genus