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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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kspPE9E1yGM
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
not yet. could happen. after the big flash, & associated disarmaments.
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...
I don't have access to it, being just a private citizen with an average-paying job, all I do is pay the taxes to support it. Not for me to use.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
Get a load of this guy.
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.
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.
...then Internet2 has delivered.
Enjoy the spam, suckaz.
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.
I bet some of you remember i2hub...
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're forgetting that this is also (presumably) a news site.
I am not devoid of humor.