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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
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