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GENI To Replace Internet, Gets $12M Funding
Postglobalism writes "A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a 'clean-slate' approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969."
Web 2.0 isn't good enough, let's have OSI 2.0! Love them X.400 email addresses, wot?
First off, once you read past the sensationalist headlines, the article just says that they are establishing a very high capacity research network to study new protocols, not trying to create a parallel infrastructure. However, that being said, trying to redesign the Internet's protocols from scratch isn't necessarily a bad idea, the current model is definitely showing its age. For example, TCP has a lot of issues on links with large bandwidth-delay products, resulting in lots of extensions and forks to support these links.
The real problem is getting a critical mass to switch. Just look at the state of IPv6 support in home networking gear and the lack of implementation all over the web. My guess is that this will lead to some new standards that will maybe be used by people doing experiments with tons of data and nobody else. Don't expect to see this work coming to a router near you.
...which already exists.
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Apparently it will only take $350 million. Whether that's accurate or not is another story. Just what TFA says.
DecNET - Never part of the Internet ....
Banyan Vines - Never part of the Internet
uunet - Company is now part of Verizon
gopher - replaced by http
telnet - used it this morning
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Apparently it will only take $350 million. Whether that's accurate or not is another story. Just what TFA says.
Right... and that $200 Billion we gave the Telecos back in the '90s was supposed to garner us a full fiber network by 2000. Oh.. wait...
It would be nice, but it's not going to happen. Keep in mind that what they are talking about here is the 'underlying architecture' - the TCP/IP protocol I would assume.
The original design was for maximum reliability. If one node failed the protocol was designed to automatically route around the failure. This is amazingly robust, but does have some performance issues.
SMTP OTOH is not underlying architecture. It could easily be upgraded or replaced. The difficulty there is adoption. There are millions, if not billions, of SMTP servers in the world. Switching to a new protocol would break down communications everywhere.
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Actually, GENI is just a research facility and their website explicitly states that it is not a replacement for the internet, rather a place where network researchers can test their ideas in a broader, more realistic environment. Privacy on the internet at the moment is not maintained by any law or by a lack of ability of major corporations to obtain your information, but by major ISPs (e.g. Warner Broadcasting) who are, in fact, major corporations. Their desire to keep your information to themselves is rooted not in their loyalty to you, but the fact that they need your loyalty. Ultimately, the new system is more likely to revise the TCP-IP means of connecting to the internet than to actually rewrite the entire internet.
"I'd call Social Security and Medicaid welfare..."
And you would be mistaken in doing so. Call anything you like welfare, but that doesn't make it so.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The headline this was posted with is weapons-grade stupid. Nowhere in the GENI plans (which have been being formulated by academics over the last several years) is there any indication that GENI should "replace" the current Internet. There are a few people involved in GENI who think that the Internet of the future might look a bit like GENI in some respects, but a much more likely outcome is that future Internet innovations will emerge from experiments carried out with GENI. GENI will be a very sophisticated research platform that allows researchers to carve up the research network into reasonably isolated slices via virtualization so that experiments into new protocols, switch architectures, etc. can be run on a full-speed network in parallel with one another without interfering. Access to GENI, much like Internet2, will essentially be restricted to researchers running experiments and essentially limited to interconnects between major research universities.
Nowhere is there any suggestion that GENI will or should:
* replace the existing internet
* develop protocols to remove anonymity from the internet
* give control of the internet to any particular government
It's a research platform for academics who think that the field of networking could benefit from large-scale research projects that are more ambitious and forward-looking than the sort of thing that can be reasonably carried out by the R&D departments of large tech corporations. Full stop. There is a ton of information available about the project from their websites, and in papers that have been published over the last several years.
im sorry but dats not an IP, its a MAC. just had to point dat out lol
Umm, turn in your geek card, loser!