Information Research Weblog

Hot off the press today - well, it just popped up on my screen - is a Webmonkey story about Internet 2. It's a journalistic piece of course, but it gives a good introduction to what is going on. Essentially, Internet 2 is

a consortium being led by 202 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today´s Internet in its infancy.

The primary goals of Internet2 are to:

• Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
• Enable revolutionary Internet applications
• Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.

Internet 2 will be faster than the present Internet and, perhaps more important, not accessible to all. I've no doubt that the spammers will find some way of attacking it, but, initially at least, it should be spam free.

Exactly what 'faster' means is indicated by an item at the Internet 2 site:

An international team set new Internet2 Land Speed Records by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data across 10,978 kilometers (more than 6,800 miles) of network in less than one minute. Using a quantity of data equivalent to nearly two feature-length DVD-quality movies, the transfer was accomplished at an average speed of more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, during the SC2002 conference held 16-22 November 2002
The Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks is an open and ongoing contest.

At the heart of Internet 2 is a new protocol, IPv6, which includes a 128 bit addressing system, which will provide addresses for billions more connections to the Internet. Already, the main operating systems (Windows, MAC, Linux and other varieties of Unix) are equipped for IPv6 implementation - although in some cases these have only 'preview' status.

A lot of those servers will be outside the USA, since Internet 2 already has collaborative networks around the world that are participating in developments, including JANET in the UK, SUNET in Sweden and RCST2 in Portugal - three countries where I happen to work and, consequently, have an interest in fast connection!