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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."
Who else thought they were talking about Web 2.0, was confused by the comments and then went back and read TFA?
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.