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Internet2 Turns 15. Has It Delivered?
stinkymountain writes "With nearly $100 million in new funding, Internet2, the faster, better Internet reserved for research and education, has embarked on an upgrade that will boost backbone capacity to a staggering 8.8Tbps and expand services to hundreds of thousands of libraries, schools and medical centers. Internet2 was created by 34 university research institutions in 1996, when the commercial and non-commercial branches of the Internet's evolutionary tree split off and went their separate ways. The mission of Internet2 was to provide reliable, dedicated bandwidth to support the ever-growing demands of the research and educational communities, and in doing so, to develop technologies that would advance the state of the 'commodity' Internet. Some say it has failed in that latter category."
I've found that surfing for pr0n on my school network is amazingly fast, er, throughputy, or whatever the adjective is.
A job well done, sir!
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Does Internet 2 come with IPv6, or is that extra?
"Some say it has failed in that latter category".
Some say that it succeeded in the category of mass-enabling of piracy at fantastical new speeds.
In Canada we have CA*Net. Same idea, works very, very well.
[...] to develop technologies that would advance the state of the 'commodity' Internet. Some say it has failed in that latter category.
I'd say that's a problem caused by the ISPs not by this initiative.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Who else thought they were talking about Web 2.0, was confused by the comments and then went back and read TFA?
Honest enough mistake, considering that nobody outside of a very select group has ever gotten to use it and likely never will.
It presents an example that we can point to whenever commercial ISP's complain about torrents and netflix crippling their system. Internet2 can do it, why can't you?
Also, you know it's working when commercial ISP's try to make it illegal for anyone but corporate entities to own fiber. They feel threatened.
It definitely has, thanks to the revolution of the wiki. If it weren't for that, the internet would have jumped the shark. Wikis truly brought us Web 2.0 as far as users are concerned. It's a shining example of how the internet is truly interactive and collaborative, and it's one of the few methods that consistently upholds the basic principles of what the web should be. OSS has also proliferated and grown thanks to the internet, and has in turn enabled better services from a wider variety of non-commercial entities. The spirit behind phenomenons such as OSS has also permeated the web, for example we have creative commons content, massive public domain efforts. We also have a brilliant distribution methods that peers independent producers with massive commercial business. Hopefully the internet will continue to uphold equality, freedom, creativity, sharing, and collaboration.
Twinstiq, game news
Yep, now I wish I hadn't wrote my comment. Oh well. Fuck it, TFA's usually filled with ads and there's usually far more insight and information in the comments. Otherwise I wouldn't include slashdot in my daily readings, I'd just subscribe to news feeds. Yes, digging through the slashdot comments is more stimulating to me than reading editorials by half-wits. I don't know what that means in general, but to me it means I need better reasons to RTFA most of the time when it comes to the subject of 'news'.
Twinstiq, game news
(Disclaimer: I work at a European university and have collaborations with a university in the US)
Internet2 is absolutely a godsend. In my work, it allows the sharing of large, expensive cluster computers (which can generate huge datasets). Wouldn't be possible without Internet2.
As for advancing the state of the 'commodity' Internet, meh. The infrastructure pays for itself in shared resources alone.
Has Internet2 provided a network for Research and Education for 15 years, continuing to grow capacity with the needs of its community? yes. Has Internet2 built a set of middleware and tools that it has open-sourced for this same community to enhance the state of research and education network operations? yes. Has Internet2 pushed the boundaries of what router vendors support, Having IPv6 when it was still considered an 'advanced service' by most network device providers, multicast, and providing a Telepresence VOIP bridge? yeah.. they've done that too. So, I suppose it depends on how you define 'Delivered.' Full disclosure: I work for an institution which is an Internet2 Member.
ok.. so heads you lose tails I win. right?
Actually anyone who has ever attended, lived at, worked for, or visited a university that is a part of the Internet2 consortium has used it. I wouldn't call that a very select group, because we're talking millions of people per year...
Apparently this guy who posted 14 minutes after you. With the exception noted that he did not go back and read TFA, and, apparently, the comments as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that what internet(1) was all about?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
until it comes out of beta.
Sig? Heil
250,000 /per year for 1Gbps = 250 /per year per Mbps ..... way cheaper than any for-profit ISP
I'd say that having an IP infrastructure solely for academic, research and non-commercial needs alone is an accomplishment and is a success.
I'd say that the lack of visible results by the common lay person, even technophiles, means that visibily the project has failed on some level. The fact that we haven't found a transition plan to IPv6 from the growing pains of I2 also means on some level, we're looking at some sort of failure(my personal hope of what we'd get from Internet2).
However, given that it's restricted access, the whole thing is largely up in the air and tech columnists and even technogeeks(Unless you're one of those academics who's pushing billions of records across the network to be processed through a giant cluster on the other side of the world) really can't comment on what I2 has achieved. Plus, what constitutes "success" is largely in the eye of the beholder. I doubt there will ever be a quantitative metric we could actually use to measure whether or not I2 is a success or not.
Despite that though, it's continued existence and growth, slow or not, does tell us that it wasn't a mistake, and it's not a failure, but it doesn't tell us whether or not it was a success, and if it is, by what measure.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
No. I'm only in late on weekdays and I don't want to wait in all Saturday. Shopping on line can still be a pain. Meat space holds back the net every time.
Unless, of course, you get the benefits of the science going there in 20 years, when you're in the brink of death and something that is being cooked up today with the help of the distributed clusters running in inet2 saves your worthless ass.
It's a shame how entertainment companies force ISP to limit nternet speeds for the average user.
Commercial entities with interests in research/education/government can be on I2 also. The I2 traffic I see mostly consists of Microsoft updates.
What made the Internet more affordable today was (in order of importance):
1 - Drastic reduction in fiber equipment costs
2 - Availability of Gigabit and 10 Gig ethernet over long range fiber / DWDM
3 - L3 ethernet switches (switches that are routers)
4 - Improvements in Linux technology (specially ever faster CPUs and IO busses) to force Cisco(and the rest of the prime IP router suppliers) routers price down
5 - Availability of GEPON and other end user fiber solution
Ultra high speed internet isn't making its way to end users because most ISPs don't see financial returns in replacing copper cabling (twisted pair and coax) with fiber yet. Anywhere end users have fiber service, you will see users with 100Mbps+ speeds. That's a financial issue, not a technological issue. Places that need fiber the most (users far from the ADSL DSLAMs and Coax Optical Nodes) are the least likely to see their cabling replaced with fiber, due to longer fiber runs needed to reach them ($$$$).
Right here in third world country Brazil, in a 2nd tier city (1 million people metro area), I could purchase a 100Mbps down / 10Mbps up fiber broadband service. But it costs US$ 300/month. But this is Brazil, far, far from the world internet core. Obviously, I couldn't find such service in a smaller countryside city.
Web 2.0 is a commercial buzzword, it has no place on a site for nerds.
The I2 network has become one that is practical and useful, rather than pie-in-the-sky. Well part of that means building it on technology that you can actually deliver for a reasonable price. That does mean that it is not a latest, greatest, fastest at all costs network. IT is not composed of the biggest, baddest OC lines you can get with CRS-3 routers behind it.
However what it does do is give good bandwidth to universities that is dedicated. I2 doesn't do transit for regular Internet traffic, it is only for communicating with peer institutions. It is a big WAN, if you want to look at it like that. That means the bandwidth is much less used and more available. Thus you get nice, fast, transfers basically all of the time.
This also has the advantage of saving the university money on their normal Internet connection. More or less you just set up your routers so that I2 is preferred, and then all traffic that can use it does. Well that is traffic that doesn't have to use your most costly I1 link and thus money is saved.
Now something else to consider about the technology is that I2 has moved over to almost all Ethernet these days. The core is all 10GigE and many connections are gig or 10 gig. This is not as high bandwidth as some other technologies but has a big advantage in the latency department.
See when you are talking all Ethernet you can do layer-3 switching. That lets you hybridize a router and a switch. More or less you get the capabilities of a router, but with the low latencies of a switch. You find that is real, real common on large networks, like campuses. The campus I work on is 100% Ethernet internally, all but the edges layer-3.
Ok well if I2 is Ethernet, then you can have layer-3 switching going on there too. This can reduce your latency. You still have some if for no other reason than the speed of light, data doesn't move instantly over long distances, but you can lower it over other kinds of routing.
Combine that with generally less hops on I2 and you latencies can be much better than I1, which is really nice for a lot of things like various kinds of cloud computing.
I2 may not be the most amazing thing out there, suing the latest tech, but it does its job damn well. It lets universities exchange data quickly, and do so at less cost.
They ISPs like would have simply turned this funding into profits while continuing to throttle individual connection speeds.
I mean seriously, what would out bandwidth look like without the throttling they put on the cable & DSL Modems?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
You pay taxes for fighter jets as well, but no one is going to let you fly them.
Also particle accelerators, rockets, deep sea submersibles, aircraft carriers, police cars, and all kinds of other things. What's the point?
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Didn't the $100M in funding go to Merit Network, not Internet2?
I'd also point out that somewhere in the middle of your list, at least in the US, would be competition. When the 1996 telco reform act forced the monopoly phone companies to allow interconnects with startup local exchanges you saw a drastic drop in price. You also saw the forming of thousands of ISPs across the country reaching into areas that none of the big companies were serving. Also backbone service got cheaper with competition. I remember having MCI lines. When MCI merged with UUnet they had to sell off their backbone as part of the regulated deal to stop them from being a complete monopoly. Cable and Wireless ended up with my contract and I instantly saw better pricing.
Once Bush put Powell's kid in charge of the FCC they rolled back all the telco reform and we saw pretty stagnant growth, the death of independent ISPs, and prices that didn't fall compared to service. There's a reason the US is so far from other countries in Internet speed and reach, monopolies suck for consumers.
For more of a rant against legislated monopoly telco, they received hundreds of billions to run fiber across the country. They still haven't delivered and never will. Most everyone in the US should be on fiber by this point, it's already been paid for.
Metal screaming actually grates on me more than pop autotune.
[I dig some clean-singing classic metal though.]
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Last I checked, all of those had potential life/death consequences if used incorrectly (and correctly for some of them). Hooking up rickb928 to the Internet2 would not. Nothing wrong with feeling a little bit cheated there.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Get a load of this guy.
stupid tea bagging idiot!!
Is it just me or is this a pretty typical left-wing kneejerk troll reaction whenever someone complains about taxes in any way, shape, or form, even if they just disagree with some particular use case? Had this complaint been voiced under the rule of Herr Bush, I doubt we would see this reaction.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
So I shouldn't be forced to pay for them.
In Sweden at least 100/100 can be had for $30/month (1000/100 for 1.5x that). This is in many mid-sized towns. The build out of fiber is to a large extent via mid-sized ISPs.
The cost of installing the fiber (up front, you own the fiber afterwards, no monthly costs for the fiber plant) is about $3000. After that it is about $30 for internet connectivity + maintenance of the fiber plant. Most of the time the company doing the build-out offer pre brokered loan deals for those who want to amortize the investment.
[Homer Simpson] The Internet2... Is that thing still around? [/Homer Simpson]
Clogged up by shitty flash and java...
Visit my Forums?
He pays taxes for scientists' salaries, offices, labs, glassware, lab coats, pocket protectors, and Bic pens too. I suppose he should also be bent out of shape that he doesn't get to use any of those directly.
Cheated? How so?
We allowed you on the Internet, and moved our stuff to Internet2. You can Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and browse the webs. You can clog the tubes with bittorrent and netflix to your heart's (*cough* ISP's) content.
In return for allowing the public on the Internet, the government funded the Internet2 so we can have enough bandwidth to still perform work with room to grow.
If it wasn't for Internet2, we would have been forced to pulled our collective weight and kept the internet in the 1990's. You should be grateful you have access, and that research and collaborative work can still go on unimpeded.
It's not like you are still using dial-up and logging into BBS.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It's about $45/month (300 SEK, including tax) for my 100/100 connection here in Stockholm, although the fibre still belongs to B2. But there are no caps, no throttling, no filtering, and no restrictions on running servers or torrents; I get to control which ports I want to have open/closed; and although we don't yet have IPv6 support, I get 4 public IP addresses. It'll do.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You're not.
You don't have to pay for any of those things. Find you a place up in Idaho where no one's been in fifty years, bring a copy of the $50 Underground House Book, and squat. If no one knows where you are, then they can't make you pay for stuff. Or you could be homeless - panhandlers don't (generally) pay taxes, and live in shelters or on the streets. Maybe even join a gang, squat in an abandoned building, and mug people for a living - you'd be paying sales tax, but at least sales tax generally doesn't go to any of the things I mentioned (maybe police cars, depending on your location).
Hell, it's even easier. Kill someone in a state with no death penalty. You won't have to pay taxes for the rest of your life.
You only have to pay for these things if you choose to be part of society.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
...then Internet2 has delivered.
Enjoy the spam, suckaz.
Hey, Asshat, I do pay my taxes. my making a point of that is the reason some others of your ilk are trying to offend me. And hey, are you as interested in funding spaceflight and military research as much as I am funding Internet development? Bet you are NOT.
Sheesh, read huh? Oh, and you ought to get an account too.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
How do you know my ass is worthless? You know nothing about me, nor do you even know how I feel about paying taxes towards Internet II.
All I do is point out that I pay taxes, and the long-haird, dope-smoking, maggot-infested liberals come out and chastise me for my narrow, intolerant, unenlightened attittude.
See? It sounds just as stupid coming from me as it does from you. Go get an account.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
1) If you knew how I felt about the Tea Party movement, you wouldn't waste the bits unless you just want a platform to vent your hyperbole.
2) Using the term 'tea bagging' is an intentional slur. You are diminished by it, except for your own insular group of the fellow-minded, which leaves you more isolated. Really, grow up and consider engaging in useful discourse. The insults remind me that this isn't about what is best for our country, it's about winning the battle and crushing the opposition. Short-sighted to go along with narrow-minded.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"In return for allowing the public on the Internet"
Um, having paid for most of it, especially the DARPA work that made it all practical, I don;t feel the least bit of shame for taking advantage of some something I pay for still.
Yes, I pay for my Internet access, I pay for my servers and their access, I pay even for people who can't so they can go to the library and get access. I don't begrudge a dime of it. The Internet has changed everything, pretty much. Good deal.
But I don't know that I benefit much from Internet II, and it's instructive that so far no one has offered me any information on that, just a vague reference to some day when I'm sick, and of course, complaining that I'm complaining about taxes, which I'm not. They read that in where it wasn't.
Pus.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Hey! If hooking me up to Internet II had the same consequences as the last time I was hooked up to a university-centric system, there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and ultimately the entire state of Arizona would be disconnected from the Internet until I was expunged and prevented from further annoying the professors and grad students/TAs.
That was fun. I'd do it again if it wasn't so disturbing to so many otherwise decent people, but the few cannot tolerate such behavior, and care not that their actions impacted so many. Hehe. Ask me some time, I might tell you about the glory days on NovaNET.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My friend works in the IT dept. at Portland State University and tells me wonderful stories of super high speed transfers and all kinds of awesome multicast TV shows along with collaboration w/ other Universities on high speed computing and new ways to deploy/share data and the management of these computer systems.
Also, torrents are screaming fast.
You indirectly benefit from Internet2 by having unrestricted growth on the original Internet.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Unrestricted growth? We pay for that. Internet II doesn't impact spending on infrastructure. It might impact design, but iron costs.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Using the term 'tea bagging' is an intentional slur
It probably was in this case, but it's worth noting that "Tea Party" members originally called themselves "tea baggers" until they learned that the term had less savory connotations.
You seem to be fixated on cost. Internet2 gives the original Internet the ability to have unrestricted growth.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
And without revenue, that ability would be moot. Actually, without revenue, there is also no ability.
I'm not fixated on cost, but I realize that the commercialization of the Internet is what has fueled its growth. Literally fueled it with money.
And I do recognize that I pay essentially $70/mo for Internet access, both static and mobile. It ain't cheap.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Actually, I didn't hear much of Tea Party organizers using the term 'tea bagger' in referfence to their membership. The initial references to tea bags was the move for April 15, 2009, to send tea bags to the White House in protest of taxes and spending/ As soon as the derogatory references were undertstood, the media used the term to refer to the Tea Party movement, and of course their detractors preferred to use the term in all manner of reference. Tea Party members both stopped using the 'tea bag' metaphorically and literally, and complained against those who used it in the intentionally slanderous meaning.
So, really, after the tea bag protest, tea bags fell so out of favor with the Tea Party that any justificaion of using such terms is a fabrication and intended to be hurtful and inflammatory. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I bet some of you remember i2hub...
The consumer use of the Internet is fueled by the growth you are describing. The research part has benefitted some from the larger number of educational institutions that are able to now afford access. However, these smaller institutions normally don't participate in research that requires the bandwidth that Internet2 offers. The institutions that use Internet2 aren't receiving much benefit (if any) from the commercial Internet.
Ironically it was the commercialization of the Internet that created the need for a seperate Internet2. This is the main reason I have doubts on how much the commercial Internet has benefitted the member institutions.
While $70/month isn't cheap for an individual, most of it goes to your ISP and not to the infrastructure being used by Internet2. Also $70/month is a miniscule amount of money compared to the costs associated with Internet2 and doesn't rise to the level of justifying your access to it. The "I'm a tax payer" meme tends to be overused. On the bright side you are reaping the benefits of the "commercial Internet". I remember when I had to pay much more than that a month for simular level of service and it was from a backbone provider that knew they were the only game in town.
I know it sounds elitist, but one of the reasons Internet2 benefit the member institution is that it is deliberately kept seperate from the more general Internet.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Look, before you go any further, I don't think that any money I spend on Internet access goes to supporting Internet 2 or Internet II or whatever you call it. In fact, I'm pretty sure taxpayer subsidies are no longer, if they ever were, covering most of the cost of the system. Universities etc. have more than enough incentive to fund the development and operation of a highest-speed Internet. It was both DARPA's desire for a resiliant communications system and unviersities seeking to build a network to leverage computing resources that led to the initial Internet, and commercializaiton has only led to its expansion, performance improvements, and coverage.
Since networks increase in value as more connections are made (was it Metcalfe that said that?), more Internet use begat more and more use. Becoming affordable meant the network became more valuable. I remember paying more than I do now for a BRI, and getting much less than I do now for my home service, much less the utility offered by mobile service.
I'm not complaining about Internet II, merely pointing out that asking my opinion on it is specious. Like most of us, we dunno how well it works, or if it is that useful, or anything. We rely on the reports of strangers. Ask them.
But this is all designed to drive page views anyways...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The real reason Internet2 was created was to let kids at different schools play Quake against each other with lower ping times... that's it.
I'm not a PR person, so don't expect this to be a wonderful color brochure.
In spite of the kind of coverage Internet2 gets on /., it is not primarily some network run by and for networking or internet dweebs. It is just a production network supporting the massive communication needs of universities, enabling computational sciences. Computer Science is a bunch of math or tech dweebs pontificating about computers, and sometimes running experiments. Computational sciences are all the other dweebs using computers to do their non-computer work: geophysics, particle physics, biology and genomics, chemistry and protein modeling, medical imaging, fluid dynamics and aerospace, weather and climate modeling, astrophysics, etc.
These researchers are shoveling data back and forth between different research centers and computer clusteres at stupendous rates. They currently talk about tens to hundreds of petabytes of active storage, without being silly. (That's 10,000-100,000 terabytes, in a real computing center.) Collaborators work at different universities on the same topics, and need to interact and share their data, just like most normal commercial business happens between different companies and facilities rather than all within a single department in some office building. Nobody knows how to respond to your question, because it is so unnatural to us to even imagine science without all this infrastructure anymore. It is everywhere; it affects more areas of work than it leaves alone!
And this is not something new: the original Internet was mostly servicing this need in the 1990s before popular awareness took off and made it useful for commerce. The Internet2 carried on this torch, while allowing the original Internet to evolve into a more consumer-oriented structure. Most of us in science use both today: in the old days, we couldn't hope to afford personal Internet hookups at home, and instead had to use our home university like a private ISP, dialing into university modem banks to get online via the big hookup they had. Now, we all use regular consumer ISP links at home, and talk to university resources via the regular Internet. Then, our big data tasks go over the alternate Internet2 links between schools, where our commercial links would never work.
You don't get to personally USE everything you pay taxes for. Some things are actually for the greater good.
Try to think outside your little box of "ME ME ME!" and stop being selfish. This "me first, everyone else can get fucked" thinking is why this country is having so many problems today.
You're forgetting that this is also (presumably) a news site.
I am not devoid of humor.