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."

Comments

Absolutely

[JambisJubilee]

(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.

Depends on how you define 'Delivered'

[mcnut]

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.