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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!
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[...] 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?
(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?
until it comes out of beta.
Sig? Heil
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.
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.
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.
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.
...then Internet2 has delivered.