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Whatever Happened to Internet II?
Julio writes "Whatever happened to the Internet II?
This cpnet story says
'There is a computer science networking instructor at the University of Wisconsin, which is an I-2 institution, that is collaborative teaching a course at a college in Japan on computer networking. The students in Wisconsin were able to hear an expert on networking who just happened to be in Japan and they weren't constrained by being in Wisconsin,'" Apparently 150 colleges are hooked to I-2 already, and it's growing steadily -- and quietly.
and you'll see this headline:
"Microsoft, not content to bloat system requirements for simple tasks, has turned to bloating bandwidth requirements for simple tasks. The new MsFTP protocol requires 4 bytes bandwidth per byte of real data sent. To that end, and in preparation for the commercial acceptance of Internet II running MSTCP/IP, Microsoft has spent billions investing in gigabit PoP technology, to ensure that you will be able to surf to ESPN to check out the score on the game, 10 MB ActiveX control and all."
Isn't this just a big private broadband IP-based network? I find it a little hard to understand how this qualifies as 'Internet II' - from what I understand this doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with IPV6.
Just 30 regional hubs?
Secondly, it's routed through more than 30 regional hubs, called gigapops. "So if a school in Gary, Indiana wants to talk to a school in Elk Hart, Indiana it shouldn't have to go through Chicago," explains Peebles.
Nice to know that the Indiana is making it's big push for world domination. ;)
Just seems like a bit of a useless article to me.
I2 is basically what the internet was back in the 80s and early 90s, before the web took over.
-A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My super-precise calculations indicate that 50% of the world's bandwidth is currently wasted on college students playing quake. The other 50% is college students downloading pr0n. Therefore, if all the colleges of the world start using internet2, we will all have super fast connections too since they will not be downloading pr0n and playing quake on our internet!! yay internet2!! ;)
Seriously though, this technology seems pretty impressive. The current internet was so poorly designed. Its barely even salvageable. We need a new system designed from the ground up to be fast and efficient. Too bad internet2 probably wont be that for home users for many years to come. Even if we all get DSL, our packets will not be routed in a reasonable manner. Traceroute your connection to your favorite websites and you'll see what I mean.. you never know when your packets will reach the next bottleneck.
My school (Johns Hopkins) is part of the internet 2, and unlike what a previous poster said, all computers have automatic access to it. I don't have access to my computer at school now (the school shut down the network for y2k...) but if I traceroute a host on any member network, for example www.mit.edu, traffic goes through through vbns.net routers (the i2 routers). (Normal traffic doesn't go through the vbns.net routers.) I haven't done much with it, but friends have reported rates of almost 1MB/sec to other member schools.
Some links:
vbns network map
Internet 2 connected schools
Sounds more like marketing hype than anything. What makes the Internet the Internet and not just another large WAN is the fact that anyone can jump on and become a part of it. Perhaps someday this will become Internet II, but right now its just an invitation only high-speed WAN. So if I create a new network that move info a bit faster than "Internet II" and hook up a few machines to it, I can call it Internet III, right? Bah, I'm not impressed; they may as well sell their network to Microsoft just to make sure its run by folks who are expert in running things their way and shutting anyone else who won't improve their bottom line out.
Yes, I undertstand that it would take something on the order of the US national debt to upgrade the Internet to "Internet II" capabilities, but it seems pretty damned precocious for them to be calling their new toy Internet II when the only thing it shares in similarity to the Internet is that it connects computers. But, of course, it will be highly praised because it serves a loftier purpose and doesn't cater to those pathetic outsiders. To quote the article: I-2 is only currently available to institutions of higher learning, and organizers don't see that changing any time soon. The whole idea is to take down roadblocks from the first Internet, like heavy traffic and slow interfaces, and speed things up for college researchers sharing information. Yeah, I'm still having nightmares about those slow-as-molasses connections that I got while I was attending a community college; took me damn near an hour to pull down a 300 MB iso on that slow beast.
I've got nothing against these colleges using the insane amounts of money that they make to build themselves up the geek equivalent of the good-ole-boy network, but labeling it "Internet II" makes me want to wretch from the oily marketing feel of the whole project. Hey, more power to them; in a few years, they'll start trickling their discarded leftovers to the rest of the world and we might begin to see improvements in the real Internet. *shrug*
Deosyne
The network is non-routeable. Institutions apply for membership. Once a member you can apply for PVCs to other institutions. Not to mention that the average connection is an OC-3 and not too many organizations have the funds for that. I2 is also very NOT commercial so it's not mainstream. Here is some news about I2's expansion in New York State. Cheers! Big Jilm
One of the goals of Internet 2 that is useful (IMO, anyway) is a test platform for very high-speed applications.
It's all very well developing some very shiny technologies that 'should work' when they have enough WAN bandwidth, but it's another thing entirely to do real-world testing on them.
Things like developing the protocols to send HDTV over the network need a real live network like this (to test human factors in development as much as technical), so it's really not just "to take down roadblocks from the first Internet, like heavy traffic and slow interfaces, and speed things up for college researchers sharing information".
People might be interested in reading George Gilder's "The Coming of the FibreSphere". Basically he calims that you can substitute mass cheap bandwidth for switches (which being electronic only add latency) creating a design of dark fibre with all the intelligence at the peripheral. Now while this may appeal to customers, certain telcos suddenly find themselves in the commodity bandwidth business with nothing to support their big expensive time-based, distance-function bills. Guess what their natural response is? How can they justify the $n per megabyte when they can't control the marginal costs and thus segment the market by imposing deliberate latencies or constraints. Remember that in the IT industry, the value migrates to the complex and difficult areas (e.g. CPU, complex software) so with companies investing in voice-activated smart phones, they lose control unless they can corner any new markets and introduce delaying tactics. Why bother with switching when you can tune to 1 of thousands of fibre frequencies, especially when you can't use more than a few hundred home shopping categories anyway. Anyway, the hope is that by giving the smart universities some taste of what is possible, they will develop bandwidth-hungry applications that will drive consumer demand and thus make large-scale cost effective infrastructure investment. Life will be interesting.
:-).
It is rather interesting that the base human desires seem to dominate new technology. I've heard an urban ledgend that the vibrator was the third patented invention that used the new minature electric motors (after sewing machine and something else I can't recall at the moment), the porn industry is leading with DVD and the porn sites (and gambling) are one of the few profitable internet enterprises. Not sure whether this is a commentary on applied technology or human nature though
LL
Well what is internet-2?
... Distance Learning, TeleMedicine, TeleMaintenance, Collaboratiive Research and Science, VTC, ... Knowledgebase - automated Data collection, manipulation, interpretation, distribution, ....
... I'm no expert (just interested).
"Reality is a self-induced hallucination."
To some in education it is an education internet.
To some in the military it is a DARPA internet project.
To some in business it is the future of the B-B eBusiness world internet.
I can not speak for internet-2, but I can say what I think ("AFT").
Internet-2 is a project with the intent to provide a developmental space for "Things to come.". Significantly greater bandwidth, vastly improved bandwidth utilization, resource management and control, and most importantly a truely enhanced functions and features rich environment for all internet users.
Internet-2 is advancing, discovering, and developing what will pe part of the future internet
Anyway this is a little of the way I look at the intent for the future internet. PLEASE, do not make the mistake of interpreting anything I said as a "1984 - Big Brother" concept. The future internet will be for the people just like today's internet. Dang Good Stuff on it's way to US folks and y'all. I just read about this stuff
WISE-YES and APES
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The interesting thing about internet 2 is that there is no provision for upgrading it. They just lobbied for all this money to build a super fast network but lacked any incentive to upgrade it. When it first came out it was monumental: 200k/sec downloads. Since then internet 1 has far surpassed internet 2 with 600k/sec downloads. Clearly, competition has driven internet 1 while not just a lack of competition but restricting use to academia has locked internet 2.
I think perhaps you misunderstand what I2 is. You're not alone: it's a FAQ: Internet2 is not a physical network that will replace the Internet. Rather, Internet2's goal is to bring together institutions and resources to develop new technologies and capabilities that can then be deployed in the global Internet. Universities will maintain, and continue to experience substantial growth in the use of, existing Internet connections, which they will still obtain from commercial providers.
The point is, anything available on Internet2 is available to everyone; the only difference is that when packets are sent inside I2, they're routed a bit differently. While I'm talking, here's my response (quoting again from the FAQ) to the accusation that the whole idea is elitist and intended to take back the Internet away from grubby corporate interests: A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector.
There is no conspiracy here to disenfranchise the non-academic user.
The Internet was rather well designed if you take account of the fact that it was initially intended only to share data and provide remote access between academic institutions, and not many of them at that. Now it has grown beyond all imagining, yet it still works using essentially the same protocols - a mark of good design IMO.
m - this has useful links at the end. For IPv6, see http://www.ipv6.org/.
As for I-2, it will be IPv6 based, but contrary to popular opinion IPv6 is not automagically faster or better than IPv4 - while v6 has many nice features such as autoconfiguration, auto-addressing, large address space, etc, there are very few features designed to make things go faster. All the technologies listed below apply equally to IPv6 and IPv4:
- MPLS - Multiprotocol Label Switching - allows administrator fine tuning of the routes taken across the network, e.g. to balance loads over the whole network, can also be used for VPNs and QoS.
- DiffServ - Differentiated Services - lets you assign a priority level to every packet (e.g. gold, silver, basic) and make gold packets get some guaranteed bandwidth or lower latency, hop by hop. Easy to deploy, does not give cast iron QoS guarantees.
- IntServ and RSVP - Integrated Services and Resource Reservation Protocol - lets applications request a certain QoS (bandwidth, latency, etc.) end to end across a network. Harder to deploy across a network, and has scalability problems, but these are gradually being addressed and it does give end to end guarantees.
There is one neat feature in IPv6 that supports RSVP - it's called the Flow Label, and is basically a number that is assigned to all packets in a given 'flow' (e.g. a video session). By assigning this number, RSVP routers after the first one in the path can go somewhat faster since they only need to look at one field rather than checking src/dest IP addresses/ports.
Windows 2000 includes many QoS features, particularly RSVP/IntServ and DiffServ, but not IPv6. RSVP is available for Linux, IPv6 is available in early form, and the Linux-DiffServ project is one of the most advanced implementations of DiffServ that is publicly available.
For more information on QoS, see http://www.qosforum.com/docs/glossary/glossary.ht
Of course, the ability to send traffic over big fat optical pipes is available to v4 and v6. However, the cost of ASICs probably dictates that gigabit/terabit routers may only support IPv4 for some time, until v6 becomes more widely deployed. However, I-2 may well be using early versions of v6 gigabit routers.
Look at what the connection prices are for an OC3 of connectivity, and $25k setup, $40k/month isn't really that much.
We'll assume I2 is much like a Tier1 provider on the currect system the rest of us are stuck with.
here's a few prices (from boardwatch.com) (the highest bandwidth listed from each backbone)
UUNET : 155Mbps = $179k/month
C&W : 21Mbps = $20.8k/month
GTE : 45Mbps = $55k/month
Sprint 155Mbps = 160k/month
I mean, you can't just hook people up, even if you are non-profit, without having some staffing, routers, utility & housing costs, etc.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
...who else could come up with this profound statement.
"Students are actually using the Internet to learn about networking," explains Greg Wood Director of the Internet II Project
who'da thunk it?
+&x
http://www.ouhsc.edu/it/digicomm/int ernet2.asp --Some stuff I collected for our website when I worked in the networking department at the medical school at OU; provides an example of how a research institution is actually handling an I2 connection.
http://www.internet2.edu -- The main website for the project.
I have seen many comments that seem to equate I2 with a "private WAN" for universities. I think a better description would be that member institutions have private peering, i.e. I am at the University of Oklahoma, and I have traffic that needs to go to hotmail.com, it gets routed through ONENET then off to Cable and Wireless, etc. If I have traffic that needs to go to MIT, it gets routed through the Abilene network and off to the MBONE. Individual PCs on our campus network do not have to "subscribe" as the University pays something on the order of $30K per month to be a member institution.
Incidentally, a happy side effect is that I could theoretically get ridiculous ping times from the dorms at OU to a QIII server at Stanford, since many institutions I know of will not be crazy enough to try to filter what traffic goes on the I2 link. (Most of the POPs will be at something like OC12 @ 622Mbps)
It's an educational WAN. Is it available fully internationally (Europe wide as well as USA and Singapore)? Does it link businesses as well as educational establishments? Are there plans to allow individual access?
I recall CNN doing a piece on "Internet 2" in 1995. They claimed that we'd all be using the newer, more highspeed internet 2 around now. The problem is that Universities don't want all the average grubbies on their private highspeed WAN.
Thing back to the early 1980s. The internet was a rather large research project, mixing military and educational computers, and allowing them to share data. Then the "great unwashed" and Big Business (tm) gradually found out about it, and started using it. At this point, the universities recognized that they needed a new architecture, free from some of the original design flaws of the internet, and free from some of the less desirable people (script kiddies, anyone?). Internet 2 also allows them to test and implement new things. Gigabit routers, IPv6, etc.
Their developments will trickle down to the internet, but don't hold your breath for general access.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This wasn't just a one time deal, it was actually a series of scheduled lectures, some originating in Japan, others originating in the US. On the US side, the professor teaching the class was Prof. Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin Madison, one of the people who helped create CSNet back in ArpaNet days. On the Japan side it was Prof. Jun Murai at Keio University who is often refered to as the Internet guru in Japan. Larry and Jun are good friends and had been wanting to do something like this for a while.
The lectures themselves were basically video-conferences. Using Sony DV equipment, the audio and video streams were sent across Internet/2 infrastructure. Someone mentioned that they didn't see what this has to do with IPv6. The Internet/2 on its own doesn't, however, this project utilized IPv6 going over ATM. There was no compression used in this, so bandwidth usage was around 35-40 Mbps. For the most part, it worked very well with amazing video and audio quality.
I've been told that this was the first time that regularly scheduled video content was sent from the US to Asia over the Internet/2. It was amazing to see it work. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to e-mail me.
Sam Etler
UW Madison
CSL Networking
It's interesting to read what Dave Farber, recently Named FCC Chief Technologist, has to say about Internet 2. You can read his position paper on Internet 2, which he calls NII2000. Even if you don't agree with his position, it's an excellent paper.
Hopefully it means that if universities want to continue building their ivory tower, they won't be doing it with my tax dollars (or not as many, anyway).
The present internet doesn't allow for absolute authority. We just move somewhere else or write a new protocol. Govts don't like this. They like order and control. Q: How do you get people from a lawless society to an ordered, controlled one? A: Send the money there. Look at the players in I2. All big players in the present internet and the Govt. Let me present a scenario. The I2 resides in security and health among those paying exhorbitant amounts to use it. It is run and nourished by some of the brightest minds in computing and those learning about it. It is closely monitored by institutions who have a close interest in security and control (DARPA et al). What do those people hope to gain from it? Why will a school shell out half a mil a year to see videos in alost real time when they have a hard time justifying buying new instruments for a music dept? The players all hope to get major stakes. What kind of stakes? How bankable are the rights to rent out large blocks of IP addresses needed to get on a superfast network? How many companies do you think would move their websites and e-commerce sites there just to be safer from intrusion. No-one really owns the present internet, therefore, no-one can really control it. Look at who owns this one? Do you think they'd really mind writing the protocol to require Intel's chip id being active to use it? Anonymity would be gone in such a system. Wanting to use it would be like wanting to drive a car. You need a license, to be registered and your vehicle does too. Call it paranoia, but this is what I'd do if I was a govt body and wanted the control back. I'd be interested to hear from those using I2 whether such requirements already exist or if you can actually remain 'just another IP address'. And the sad part is people would give up anonymity for bells and whistles.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
has probably been stated at least once or twice but alot of people are still confused. The big difference between the internet 1 and 2 is that the internet 2 is circuit switched rather than being packet switched. Sure packet switching may be a bit more modular but it's also much slower and requires enormous routers to send the packets on their merry way. This leads to much faster speeds and less latency between two nodes on the network. The ATM networking scheme is what let them get a 40 Mb connection between Wisconsin and Japan for good quality uncompressed video. I bet it looked damn cool.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.