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Internet2 Gets a New Backbone
wrong_fuel writes "A few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time regarding a merger of the two networks. Those talks have fallen apart and Internet2's contracts with Qwest communications had already been allowed to lapse. Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for its next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year (the old one was referred to as "Abilene") and current member Universities will be migrated off of Abilene by September 2007."
Whats the odds it's google with all that dark fiber?
Who wants to speculate that it is Google?
More backbone capacity is needed for all the spam and porn.
I love those 5MB/s downloads from the open source software mirrors at other universities; even ones which are not too close to here (Pittsburgh) are really fast. I love you, I2.
Last I heard in the news it was used to exchange pr0n and other warez, but seriously, could someone link me to some project that require such high bandwidth over long distances?
What kind of computing jobs are best paralellized with such network?
Anything easy enough for casual programmer to start working on?
When can I get it at home?
And here I am, stuck on 512/256. What year is this?
Get your own free personal location tracker
"Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for it's next generation backbone."
Evidently, according to this the carrier is the next generation backbone.
Good to see cowardly Internet2 is finally willing to stand up and show some spine.
Now, maybe I'll pluck up the courage to register my own username on Slashdot.
Nah, all the good ones are taken.
For reference.
I'm wondering. Would the bill apply to Internet2? Would it apply to any IP based network? Obviously not all IP networks are The Internet. At what point could educational establishments along with sympathetic corportations like Google and sites like slashdot start their own internetwork and leave the tiered internet crowd without google, ebay, amazon or any of the geeks who actually make the internet an interesting place to be? Wouldn't customers sign up for google's internet rather than at&t's?
Would the law apply to the new internetwork?'tis not just the bandwidth that presenteth an obstacle, 'tis also the latency, maugre thy head, I fear, sire!
Seriously you can have gazllions of MB in bandwidth, but if it takes > 0.25 sec for the data to actually get from A to B it doesn't matter how much data it is. Burst isn't everything.
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
Internet2 was announced in October 1996, now 10 years later it still seems to be poorly developed. Internet2 was going to be the net of the future. Now it is the future, and we still have a significant population unable to get broadband (I don't consider satalite internet feasable), and its still priced too high for other users.
I'm all for advancing these new technologys, but too often it is forgotten that portions of the population can't even subscribe to an aging technology.
The digital divide is still alive and well unfortunally.
I can assure your it isn't Google. They woudn't miss a nice PR opportunity.
I better hurry, because i haven't yet downloaded everything from the *current* intarweb !
National Lambda Rail? No....You have to RIDE the rail, THEN you launch the Lambda SATELLITE.
I'm beginning to think these trolls are generated electronically. It could be done I suppose. Simply use the slashdot article as a kind of "seed" and let the algorithim generate a somewhat coherant, vaugely relavant troll, according to a certain framework. In this case, it appears to be some kind of religious rant.
Has anyone heard of this kind of technology?
May the Maths Be with you!
xcopy \internet \internet2\old /A /E /H
liqbase
i am just curious why they are just going to build their next backbone with scaling up to 80 10gbps lambdas. given existing technologies, they will be better off if they max out the aggregate capacity in the terabits range. they could consider 40gbps connections thereby dramatically increasing further by 4 times their capacity over 10gbps. given that they use up the 10gbps bandwidth today, then 100gbps of initial capacity may not be enough given that it is now easier to enable computers with 10gbps connections.
:)
the article does not provide much technical details and may be subject to changes once they finalize the decision. factors such as them leasing the actual dark fiber, putting their own (or the telco) optical switches, and of course financial matters may affect their decision. but i hope they may be successful in the upgrade.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
If I had a gazillion MB in bandwidth, I'd multiplex a gazillion connections together and send a few years worth of backups across all at once. Time : a little more than 0.25 seconds.
And no whining about the NICs being unable to handle it. Would I be paying gazillion MB connection fees if I weren't able to use it? The prices start at $243,000i per month!
They're there affecting their effect.
The "bot" already has an account.
few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time ... Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for it's next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year.
In honour of the Tri-Lambda crew, I think we should name the new network "Revenge of the Nets"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why the negative moderation? Because parent is pedantic?
Guys, come on. It's techie site right? Read by people who understanding regular expressions, OO, etc. Programmers, developers, hackers, crackers. Supposedly talented individual who no doubt consider themselves above average intelligence. Yet can be bothered to remember that possessive prepositions don't have apostrophes. What gives?
(Although the predictable response is along the lines ofM$ is teh sux0r!!111!! Gr4m3r is 4 lusers!11!!
Go check out the bandwidth specs required for the LHC at CERN.
Not sure if there is anything easy enough for a casual programmer, but there might be if you can handle the data flood.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
In case you were serious, google "Markov chains".
Japan has high population densities basically everywhere, so it's economically feasible to bring broadband everywhere. Nobody is very far from a local head-end installation (cable or telco), which is the limiting factor in bringing DSL and cable-Internet technologies to people in most places where it's not available now.
I'm willing to bet that the same situation is true in Sweden: those "remote villages" you're talking about aren't very big, and they're probably easier to wire for broadband than typical suburban-sprawl America. Although I'm sure the overall population density of Sweden is very low, I'm pretty confident that the density is distributed unevenly: small clusters of relatively high density (a village), separated by great distances. So again, you can bring the backbone, via microwave relays or fiber probably, out to the village's headend / telco building (the DSLAM), and then from there most of the subscribers are probably within cable modem or DSL range.
It's the same reason why I'm confident that Canada will achieve (if it hasn't already) greater broadband access than the U.S. to probably 80% of its population: a very large part of the population is concentrated in urban areas in a relatively small area of the country, contrary to what you'd expect if you just looked at an overall "persons per square mile" figure. Of course, that last 5-10% of people who don't live in the urban areas and are out in the Northern Territory or on farms in Saskatchewan are going to be a real bitch. In the U.S., we've already hit that limit: most people living in urban (and most suburban) areas have some type of broadband available. We're at that "last x percent" already, only in our case, x is very large due to the type of low density development that's common across much of the country.
The corporate-conspiracy stuff may play well, but there's very little truth behind it. If it were economically feasible to give every trailer and farmhouse in the boondocks of Pigs Knuckle, IA broadband, I'm sure all the providers would be falling over themselves to do it. But you can only cover so much area with broadband from a DSLAM, it's a pretty much fixed radius (I'm not sure exactly for cable but on DSL it's generally ~18000 line-feet); if you don't have people clustered together, that quickly becomes impractical. Heck, there are still places where cable TV is impractical, and it has a much larger radius from the head-end than broadband.
Wiring for broadband isn't a walk in the park. It's a pretty significant upgrade to systems that were only ever intended to carry frequencies up to a few thousand hertz, and whether you're a corporation or the government, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. It's not worth it to roll out $100,000 worth of infrastructure if it's only going to gain you 10 subscribers at forty bucks a month. Sure, you could subsidize the hell out of that development with tax money, but I think there are a whole lot of things that our taxes should be spent on (like, I don't know, teaching people to read) before we go throwing vast quantities of money at the problem, especially when the technology isn't mature. (And I think based on the lack of support for govt-subsidized Internet, this is pretty common.) We'd just barely have the whole country wired for 1MB cable and probably only be started paying off the trillions of dollars that it would cost, when people would be saying "one megabit?! Damn, man, you might as well be using 2400 baud. You can't do anything without [FTTN/FTTC/802.11n/$new_networking_technology]!" And we'd be off again.
I remember it wasn't that long ago when people were talking about getting universally available Internet access. Not free Internet, not high-speed Internet, just the AVAILABILITY of a local ISP to everyone in the country, without having to make a long-distance call. I'm pretty sure we made it there sometime during the Boom, but did you hear anyone talk about it? I didn't. Because by the time we actually found that goal, people
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Most point to point fiber connections have 2-10 ms latency. That's a slow LAN, but hellagood WAN latency, especially if you're coming from a DSL/T1 world. Generally an order of magnitude faster.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Let me guess. You are a gamer?
I work for a University and we used to be a member of Internet2. While it was nice to have high-speed connections to other members of the Internet2, we quit because of the high costs and we could not justify the costs for a small University with less than 5,000 students.
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It costs at least $300,000 minimum per year to join Internet2. The fees are as follows:
$30,000 Internet2 Membership fee (http://members.internet2.edu/Member-Dues.html)
$220,000 Abilene Membership fee for OC-12 (http://abilene.internet2.edu/community/fees/inde
Additional fees are assessed depending on which GigaPop you would be connected to (http://eng.internet2.edu/gigapoplist.html). The quote I had to become a member with one Gigapop was approximately $75,000 an year, plus local loop costs.
It's very difficult for us, and probably most Universities, to justify spending over $300,000 a year to become a member of Internet2. Until Internet2 can be better managed and lower costs, I do not foresee Internet2 becoming popular anytime soon.
In case anyone was wondering...
The Meaning of Liff .sig under construction...
From : There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you -- Internet3: The Rise of Google
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
somebody mod this up already.
It depends how you are doing the remote access. Consider a standard Model-Controller-View system. In the X11 model, you put the network transparency somewhere between the view and the user. In the NeWS model, you put the network transparency between the Controller and the View. Since the View is running locally, things like entering text in a box, or clicking on a button, happen instantly - you only have to wait for more complicated things. This makes 100ms+ latencies quite tolerable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd put my buck on (badly constructed) context-free grammar instead.
New York
Is'nt that the NERD fraternaity from "Revenge of the Nerds?"
Internet2.
Why?
Why not?
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
At least the way it works at fermilab, you have to join one of the experimental collaborations before you are allowed to use the data. So, a casual programmer could only do something with it if he or she got a job at Atlas or CMS or whatnot, in which case he or she would not be exactly a casual programmer anymore.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
...in this InformationWeek article:
Universities Snatch Up Unused Cable For High-Speed Networks
The most ambitious and high-profile of these endeavors is the National LambdaRail, a large fiber infrastructure capable of connecting more than 25 U.S. cities at speeds in multiples of 10 Gbps.
What's your point, exactly? NYC is an example of a well-wired city, at least in terms of residential broadband. See this report (PDF), issued by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
From the NYC report: "Well ahead of many parts of the country, New York City has achieved nearly universal deployment of competing broadband technologies for residential customers. According to Verizon, 85-90 percent of all telephone lines in the five boroughs are eligible for DSL service. The city's cable franchisees report that all homes in the five boroughs are eligible for cable Internet service." (Emphasis mine.) By the way, this report isn't even new, it's from over a year ago.
Sounds pretty good to me. You wants your broadband, you gets your broadband. In most cases, you can choose between DSL and cable (and probably between various providers for DSL, e.g. Verizon, Speakeasy, etc.); in some places you can even get fiber. It's actually harder to get broadband as a small business than it is for a residential customer, because many businesses and commercial buildings aren't wired for cable TV. (Although I suspect they probably have more options for telco-supplied broadband, if they're willing to pay.) And this doesn't even count the fact that in most of the places I've visited in NYC (residential areas) there isn't exactly a shortage of open, unsecured wireless access points -- I know people living there who never pay for their Internet access, because they just pick an open AP at random when they want to log on. It's not a recommended access method, but it's indicative of rather high penetration.
Here's the bottom line: Okay, so it gets beat by some of the Asian megacities, big deal, we knew that already, they're way more dense. But in terms of comparable cities, it beats all comers. So was that your point?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't see why NLR is even mentioned in the writeup as it has nothing to do with the article. It makes no sense for internet2 to get involved with the research being done on the NLR level. Internet2 needs to work its way into a higher level commodity internet and let newer research networks develop.
pussy.
"Because Internet2 is a member organization, all contracts have to be approved by members. Once that happens the name of the new service provider will be revealed, the group says."
Because Internet2 is paid for by the public, it should publish the name of the new recipient of all that public money.
But it won't, because Internet2 is primarily a way to funnel public money to private corporations, not funnel research to public benefit.
--
make install -not war
Internet2 was designed as a response to the commercial bastardization of "Internet1." It was never intended to be soiled by consumer hands, but reserved exclusively for the ivory towers of academia. That is to say, the whole idea was in effect to return that portion of the net to its pristine pre-1995 state...only a hell of a lot faster, not least as it would not be constipated by ordure of the unwashed masses.
The demand is there, for the most part they refuse to do the last mile because it would only be quickly profitable in just a few areas. Other areas might take years, so they just don't care, and the feds refuse to order them to do it, like they should, data being now so important to the economy.. Some areas can get decent speeds, but humongous areas of the US (with millions of people included) are still on dialup, with absolutely no way besides expensive buggy satellite to get any sort of broadband. You have to be two miles or less from the nearest telco switching box to even get marginally faster DSL. It's like during that "boom" they were starting to go for it, run fiber or cable everywhere, then stopped at 90% of the job done.
the telcos going way back to original ma bell were allowed a full monopoly, got granted all sorts of public right of ways, enjoyed immense profits for *generations*, then simply refuse to plough some of that back in to making the whole system high speed and functional. they resisted like crazy even putting basic POTS everywhere initially. they are still resisting putting decent simple copper in some places, a lot of people can barely get 28.8, yet the copper they strung was paid off DECADES ago. In my state, they are only required to have copper capable of 19.2, I kid thee not. Yet you can read the financials and see how much money they make.
The government dropped the ball on forcing them to give up *some* profit and to constantly upgrade until it was reasonably good all over. We proved how much a benefit good road systems are, so we spend the money on that, we need to do the same with connectivity. The faster we wire up the nation the better the economy expands, which will help "pay" for it faster.
When I got my phone installed here (I am three miles from the switch box, and this is a decent county two lane blacktop road, plenty of folks around here, it is not remote wilderness at all), I asked them when I would be able to get broadband DSL. The guy said "never, unless we are ordered to do it by the government". They could do it, they just don't want to, it's more profitable for them to sit on what they have and milk it for years.
I love that chapter in Half-Life.
Ya, and we don't like paying to subsidise your food and WATER. Most large urban areas get insanely cheap water delivered to them that was basically *stolen* from the rural areas. How about we take control back of our water and put it up for bid, capitalism rules, eh? How would you like a buck a gallon delivered to your tap? Free market, anything goes? that would do it, we could afford a lot of broadband out here if you paid us a true market value for water. I'd love to stick it to the urban centric bungholes with some "market driven" reality. Eat your iPod, it's tasty! You don't think your water hasn't been subsidised? Your food? You don't think your food makes it to your trendy deli over subsidised roads? You want to go to "capitalism rules" full toll roads everywhere? Your trendy in town place might still look cool, but not when you would be forced to drop 20 bucks on a hamburger and ten on a loaf of bread and a shower might cost you $25 dollars at a buck a gallon prices. And why would we charge less than that, you sorta need food and water, we could make that happen if we were allowed a free market and the government stopped stealing the rural folks natural resources to basically almost give it away to urbanites. Your house? How about we bump price of lumber up to 20 bucks a 2x4? Entirely possible, the lumber industry could just cartel out and set minimum pricing, same as OPEC does with oil. How ya like that? Cement for your high rises, the raw iron ore that goes into your steel products?
How about the coal for your electricity, a lot of it taken off public lands. What if the government sold all that off, not leased it cheap, outright sold the land the coal was on to highest bidder, they get to own that "rural" coal all over, then set prices to whatever the hell they felt like. Think your electric rates wouldn't go up? Go flip all your breakers off and wonder how long until your pad becomes miserable to live in. go ahead, run everything off your cellphone battery and whatever that is holding now. why don't we just bump your electric rates up 1,000%, free market rules? You still think electric is unimportant to your "lifestyle"?
I just can't wait for this globalism phony economy to collapse and watch all you pompous arrogant yuppies struggle to try and live. You have NO idea how well off you are and how a lot of it came from a combination of government subsidies, forced and regulated monopolies and sheer ripping off the rural people because they don't have as large a voter base. I would LOVE to have capitalism rules in place for all the things you take for granted as being somehow your right to cheap and easy.
So the rural (and a hell of a lot of just plain suburban) folks would like to get broadband, that is just so terrible...."the nation can't affford it". We rural folks sure as hell could afford it by ourselves if the feds weren't protecting you from *real* capitalism. Oh, you are going to import, bypass from us? No probs, our buddies who own the ports decide 600% tariffs are in order, maybe higher, because we know you got to eat, so we would have you by the short and curlys. Don't like it, starve, download some pictures of food and eat them, eat your fern hanging in the window, who cares. And if you decide to evacuate, move to the country and 'grow your own food" and drill your own well, no probs, half a million an acre a year *lease*, no ownership, you stay a renter forever. And you get to pay for the toll roads on the way out of the city, every time you cross over into another persons property, not a public road, private property that got taken over by the feds, now back to pure private property, stop and pay another toll, whatever they decide to charge. $5 a mile to walk, $20 to drive, sound fair? Oh, you don't like it, so you turn around around and go back to the city-paying tolls that way, too. Whoops! Toll roads going out are one price, going back they are twice as expensive, just because we could charge that. You don't have the money? Fine, yoiu get treated exactly the same way as a g
Ah NeWS. It has been slowly and painfully reinvented. I believe the kids these days are calling it "AJAX".
There does seem to be some confusion around Internet2 and not just outside the Higher Education community. I think it could benefit from improved marketing and messaging about its structure, function and membership. Perhaps what the article was referring to was the RFP issued this year for The Quilt. Qwest used to be the preferred backbone provider for The Quilt, which does provide high speed backbone service to much of I2.
The results of their RFP will be officially announced May 5 according to their site.
Come play Moral Decay!