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Whatever Happened to Internet II?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-alive-and-well dept.

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.

2 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Some more stuff... by bocee · · Score: 5

    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

  2. The FibreSphere by LL · · Score: 5

    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