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Article In The Guardian On Internet2
Sam Halter writes: "The Guardian carries this story about the future of the Internet and the expermental Super high-speed academic networks that are being built in Europe and the U.S."
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I'm on the "blazing" internet 2 now. This office is part of the main connection. But guess what! There's 1 connection coming in. And interstate workers have cut the line like 3 times in the last week.
How am I supposed to keep productivity up with this internet 2 thing?!
(As I post to slashdot, click refresh, see what my karma is, refresh,
wash, rinse, repeat if necessary)
Along with the new infrastructure, how about a new browser and a different protocol. Seems like HTTP and webpages as we know it could be made so much better if you had an HTML type language that was more of a application toolkit/RAD deal. So I could write a GUI that is as nice as a local one and doesn't have to be installed on your computer...I guess this is what XUL is supposed to do.....
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
IMHO, i'd rather have service that is stable where the provider doesn't play any tricks (ahem, Cox@home blocking port 80, ahem), etc.
I kinda view this the same way as i view the "3G" cell phones. I don't care if Joe the businessman can video conference, i just want to have decent voice quality. Same goes for the net... i don't care if Joe the net surfer can browse his pr0n ten times faster, i just want it to work well!
I'm ignorant on this subject, but I've read the article and it seems like this Internet2 thing is just around the corner, so if I wanted to put some money in and hopefully make a profit down the line, what companies could I invest in? Does anybody know?
~ now you know
It was interesting to read in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" how Europe fumbled with computer manufacturing to the point that the industry is non-existent. Hopefully the latest round of deregulation will help their telecom companies compete. Whether or not they can efficently transfer technology from the lab to the market as well as the US or Asia remains to be seen.
Does internet 2 use IPv6? v4 is getting very limiting.
IMO the only way to get v6 adopted is (was?) to build a new internet. One of those chicken-and-egg problems, no incentive to upgrade the routers because the endpoints don't use it yet, endpoints don't use it because the routers can't route it.
You've got to wonder how far this is going to get without commercial support. If the thing remains pure, then that's great-- but there's only so far it can go.
The internet didn't really pick up until businesses got the idea that they could rape it for all it's worth. Of course, this is what left the researchers feeling like they needed something new in 1996, but it's also probably the reason that it's as widespread as it is today. You can't have a revolution these days if somebody's not coughing up the cash.
Not that using this thing to get a nonexistant ping in Quake 3 isn't a bit of a shame. But it's a bit optimistic to think that the future for Internet2 is as rosy as the article implies, I think.
At the very least, getting some corporations involved in something other than a research capacity would allow them to supply some advertising muscle-- I mean, you'd think somebody in the past five years would have been able to come up with a snappier title than "Internet2."
The title Article In The Guardian On Internet2 is erroneous. The article is actually about Geant, "the new pan-European network serving more than 3,000 of the continent's academic and research institutions". Basically, Europes version of I2.
-no broken link
I'm currently a student at the University of Maryland we have Internet2 connectivity. Stolen from OIT's network throughput page is:
A 75Mbps connection to Qwest Communications for commodity internet traffic.
An Gigabit Ethernet connection to MAX (Mid Atlantic Crossroads), a consortium of local research institutions, through which we have high speed connectivity to those institutions as well as the NSF vBNS network and the Internet2 Abilene Network.
An ATM connection to UMATS, the intercampus network of the University System of Maryland for connectivity with other USM schools.
Internet2 gives me downloads very close to the theoretical max of the 10megabit connection to my room, which is great for being an ultra-low-ping bastard in games. With the gigabit connection, the ping times to basically any location on Internet2 is the same as if it was on your LAN.
To answer the IPv4 vs. IPv6 question, it uses the same IPv4 that the rest of the world uses, it just appears to be more infrastructure to speed up things.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
I know linux has support for it. But have any ISP's taken steps towards actual implementation?
Does MS have support in XP?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
How about, oh, InternetXP? Or follow Intel's use of Itanic, and you get Lusitaniet. Or perhaps AMD's use of tool names would yield the BallPeenNet.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
OK Folks. I worked in URi's networking department and I'll tell you what I2 is. I2 is a high-speed connection to other universities with I2, it is NOT the 'future' it is NOT anything special. Packets originating inside our school hit the router, if the destination is on I2, the packets go through the I2 pipe, if not they hit the commercial router. You can get stats on URI's Internet connections at http://zeppole.uri.edu/mrtg/, you can see that the I2 is not heavily used because most people want stuff off the .com TLDs.
.iso from redhat.com it goes really slowly, if I get it from rutgers.edu it flies. Nothing 'revolutionary' just the Internet as it was meant to be.
If I want to download an
Now if I could only connect URI to the high-school hosted in our building (the high school is ten feet above me, but 12 internet hops!).
If network folks interconnected more, the world would be a lot better.
There is supposedly going to be some sort of dance production to promote Internet2 at the SuperComputing 2001 conference in Denver. The performance is going to be done entirely on Internet2, with choregraphers, dancers, and a sypmhony from various locations around the world.
There's an article here. The project site is here.
Having done some good looking-into for this...a lot of these comments are irrelevant.
Commercialism: The Internet(1) is plenty good for this. Internet2 is for research. In fact "Internet2" isn't a network, but a group of people, much like "open source" isn't a company but a movement. Abilene is the network the people who are Internet2 memebers connect to, and it's pretty much only research traffic. You can connect to the internet (commodity traffic) over your I2/Abiline link, but that is not routed over the Abiline backbone you have to pay for an ISP for that as well.
Controlled? Not really. Once you are in, you can do just about whatever you want with other orgs that are in as well.
Get this in your room? Not likely, unless you can get through the application process (stating that you are a research university, nonprofit research group, or a corporation doing research with at least $25,000 to spare for dues. You then have to buy an OC3 to a local "gigapop", who will connect you (and then probably pay more if you want to use any of this bandwith to get to the Internet(1)). I would skipp all the paperwork and extra fees and just get the OC3 if I were condiering this. I mean $2000/month is better than $4000/month and a lot of red tape.
What they are getting in return? They are doing research in middleware, networks, video, you name it...that is on the leading edge. Enough research in these areas and you're going to come up with some pretty neat ideas: product ideas, service ideas, etc.
However I2 isn't just supposed to set FTP speed records. Connecting educational institutions was designed to advance research in high speed network and practical applications. Some mentioned were interactive video applications, multicast HDTV and the like. It will be great when we start to see these apps, but unfortunately this will be some time coming.
While I2 now provides the theoretical playground for researchers and some developers to start generating next generation applications and protocols, these applications and protocols will most likely depend on the bandwidth of I2. Right now there are like 200 universities that are on I2. However the technology that is produced by them will stay theoretical until thousands of companies gain access, and those companies will have to wait until millions of homes are wired before they can ship their products.
I see I2 as being a lot like IPV6. A needed improvement, and a good thing. However something that will take time to permiate into our daily lives. Here's hoping it doesn't actually take that long to hit the market.
I'm not a tech guru... but why can't we make a new "net" wirelessly, using 80211B connectors, that share information with a gnutella like interface with other computers around us? We could have a cloud of computers instead of a net. all the computers witin range of a connection, sharing 10 percent of its resources with all the others, which in turn share with the ones they connect to... this could actually replace the internet.
Isn't this wonderful? when people that meet in chat rooms decide to finally go out to dinner together, they STILL won't have to physically interact with each other!
C'est pas apres qu'on a fait dans son pantalon qu'il faut serrer les fesses.
The real question is, will we see IPv6 deployed on Internet2, and will the 'little guy' be able to participate in the core structure of the internet2 (i.e. be assigned routable IP space)?
/19.
The internet was supposedly designed to route around points of failure, however this is now only really true of the 'core' of
the internet - As it grows, it becomes less and less robust, since routable IPs are no longer available to people who need less than (or can't afford to pay for) a
Without being able to advertise routes, you are at the mercy of your (neccesarily) sole inbound provider, and this is the way that most corporate and government interests would like it to stay.
What the Internet2 needs is a new routing protocol, or at least employ equipment with a decent capacity for route tables.
What is the point of IPv6 (more address space) if you can't route what you currently have without hacks like CIDR.
There is absolutely no point in assigning every device an IP address if the majority of those devices are not accessible directly, or cannot be accessed if failures further up the heirarchy cannot be routed around,. rendering them unreachable. It's just stupid.
Only with the provision to allow new players to 'compete' on equal technological footing with 'the big boys' will we see meaningful growth in internet technologies past the next 10 years or so.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Ok, first of all. Internet2 is slow. Really slow. They are hopeing for 10Gigabit in 2003? What? I know people with home networks that fast. That really is bottom of the line when it comes to backhaul networks. Most major telecommunication companies know have backbones in the Tb range, because of DWDM technology. I know Time-Warner has 80Tb lit, and will another 80Tb soon. You used to be able to get around 10Gigabit on a single fiber strand, now its about 16x that with dwdm technology by Nortel, Lucent, or a host of other companies. Thats 160Gigabit on a single strand of fiber. This network really is not fast in any way whatsover. I have used computers on schools on I2, it really isnt that fast. In fact, its so bogged down, its slower then 10Mbit for the most part.
Second, I wouldnt exactly call Europe lagging behind hind us in bandwith. In fact, as far as bandwith between colleges they kick our ass, and have for many many years. Have you have transfered between Euro schools. We are talking about 8-9megs a second, consistantly. I believe their is a network (not sure if its Janet or what its called) that is 80Gigabit running between a bunch of schools. The bandwith at uwente.nl is amazing. Thats why all the top software piracy sites are located there. US colleges internet speeds are pathetic and in the range of 1/100th of that of Euro schools. Most euro schools I have ran into have 100Mbit to the dorms, and have for years, most US schools are still 10Mbit (I know University of Washington , where I go, is, and I can name of dozens of other major universities that are). In fact, 1Gigabit in dorms is really starting to become popular in euro schools. Like I said, Utwente.nl has quite a few software piracy sites running a 1Gigabit. We cant even hope to catch up until we upgrade to at least 100Mbit in most of our schools. Then we will still be years behind.
Jeff Knox
You may want to learn what Internet2 actually is and why it exists. As stated several times by Stas Shalunov in these threads, Internet2 is dedicated to advancing core Internet technologies, while providing optimized, unsaturated bandwidth for demanding educational and research applications. The engineers of Internet2 are researchers, and one day those same "annoying users" you talk about will be using technologies developed at I2.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
CANARIE is an Internet2 peer:
e rs.html
http://www.internet2.edu/international/html/partn
Intercarve Networks, LLC
Latency is a prime concern of the I2 network architects. One of the cooler aspects of the whole I2 thing in hardware is the use of packet switching schemes that resemble circuit switching schemes. Instead of a packet just flying around the network trying to get to the other end of it by whatever path a router deems viable, I2 routers route all of the data from two sources along the same path. Packetswitching was designed to be redundant for lossy networks, not fast for high availability networks. Routes can easily be recalculated but having data all go the same way lowers latency dramatically. I remember reading a bit ago about a realtime video conference between a professor and his class in the US and a professor and his class in Japan. Uncompressed realtime video doesn't work real well on the more traditional packet switched networks of the current internet. An interesting aspect of the circuit switching like packet switching is that specific pathways between a destination and origin can be planned out ahead of time and even sold. Instead of merely selling X megabits (or maybe gigebits) of bandwidth a company could sell a direct path or high priority path between two network nodes. Junior sending a video of his skateboard competition to grandma wouldn't interfere with the realtime traffic of a big Fortune50 paying beaucoup dollars for their network while Junior and Grandma are paying 50$ for their cable modems.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
People are getting it all wrong. I2 isn't the "next" or "new" Internet and it wasn't created for brand new applications or new "mindsets" for doing things because it's so blistering fast. It was created because schools can't afford commercial pipes. It's less expensive to connect schools together directly than connect them to a national, commercial provider at these high speeds.
I2 is primarily fast because it isn't used all that much. You don't have thousands of AOL dialups clogging up the network, @Home/Time Warner boxen downloading pirated movies, or the psychic friends network using it to do their VoIP. That all eats bandwidth. Instead, you have the occasional geek downloading a slackware distribution, or browsing the Computer Science department of another university. If suddenly all the schools would allow traffic over their commercial pipes to access their I2 routers, I'm sure the network would slow down now seeing it's accessible to the public - along with all the abuses and bandwidth eating applications.
I guess the best analogy to this would be comparing it to an underground tunnel between schools only for academic use, compared to a giant highway for public use. The underground tunnel doesn't nearly have the capacity of the massive highway, but is much faster. So just because something is fast doesn't mean its on the edge of technology or is, in fact, anything special.
I have used I2 and it is quite fast, but what can you get on it? The latest well hyperlinked personal page of a student in a nearby school? This makes it loose much of the reason why the real Internet is so popular -- it's a space where you can find anything. But I2 defeats this purpose by limiting what the network can connect to, and thus its usefulness. It may be useful at testing new applications, like an HDTV stream, but since you're not doing this on a public network to begin with it's applications are limited to your own, highly restrictive network. You can't say you've done something new when all you've done is create an exclusive network that doesn't address the real problems of networks anyway - like last mile access and exponentional bandwidth increases. IMO, I2 is a way for schools to have a fast link to each other without paying the huge costs associated with a 1 GB link to the national backbone. That's all it is, and that's all it probably will be.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Sounds reasonable. Colleges only have to provide you with resources to do your work, they're not obliged to let you surf for pr0n or download MP3s. It's a privilege, not a right.
Grab.