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The Internet

Whatever Happened to Internet II? 176

Posted by Roblimo from the it's-alive-and-well dept.
Julio writes "Whatever happened to the Internet II? This cpnet story says 'There is a computer science networking instructor at the University of Wisconsin, which is an I-2 institution, that is collaborative teaching a course at a college in Japan on computer networking. The students in Wisconsin were able to hear an expert on networking who just happened to be in Japan and they weren't constrained by being in Wisconsin,'" Apparently 150 colleges are hooked to I-2 already, and it's growing steadily -- and quietly.
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Whatever Happened to Internet II? More

Whatever Happened to Internet II?

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  • I'm not sure how much this will be scintillating the average /. reader, but I've always wondered what happened to I2(Just doesn't work in Roman Numerals, does it?)

    It's an educational tool, and seems to me to have more in common with a large academic WAN (high bandwidth, no fluff) than with our beloved Internet (creepy-crawly, mix-mash). A lot of the genius of the Internet (mark I) came about because of people being random. It's rather like Hyde Park, except with less people wrapped in flags.

    Well, maybe not all that many less.

    Anyway, this is more of a 'Whatever happened to...' article than anything. Thanks for the information.

    It'd be nice if every institute of higher learning managed to wire to this puppy without tripping over the pitfalls that so shifted (and improved?) our Internet.

    Apologies for the choppiness, I write this while I negotiate with one of my suppliers.

    -l

  • fast forward 5 years... (Score:3)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @01:49AM (#1403009)
    and you'll see this headline:

    "Microsoft, not content to bloat system requirements for simple tasks, has turned to bloating bandwidth requirements for simple tasks. The new MsFTP protocol requires 4 bytes bandwidth per byte of real data sent. To that end, and in preparation for the commercial acceptance of Internet II running MSTCP/IP, Microsoft has spent billions investing in gigabit PoP technology, to ensure that you will be able to surf to ESPN to check out the score on the game, 10 MB ActiveX control and all."

  • Isn't this just a big private broadband IP-based network? I find it a little hard to understand how this qualifies as 'Internet II' - from what I understand this doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with IPV6.

    Just 30 regional hubs?

    Secondly, it's routed through more than 30 regional hubs, called gigapops. "So if a school in Gary, Indiana wants to talk to a school in Elk Hart, Indiana it shouldn't have to go through Chicago," explains Peebles.

    Nice to know that the Indiana is making it's big push for world domination. ;)

    Just seems like a bit of a useless article to me.

  • Internet 2 is a very exclusive network. At our college, which just recently got its own I2 feed, you have to petition on a per-machine basis to connect, and you'd better have a damned good reason for needing to do so. Also, when thinking about I2, try not to associate all the other, lamer parts of the "normal" internet (like the public in general) with it.

    I2 is basically what the internet was back in the 80s and early 90s, before the web took over.

    -A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • All this bandwidth only for colleges... (Score:4)

    by Mitkin ( 68538 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @01:58AM (#1403013)
    My super-precise calculations indicate that 50% of the world's bandwidth is currently wasted on college students playing quake. The other 50% is college students downloading pr0n. Therefore, if all the colleges of the world start using internet2, we will all have super fast connections too since they will not be downloading pr0n and playing quake on our internet!! yay internet2!! ;)

    Seriously though, this technology seems pretty impressive. The current internet was so poorly designed. Its barely even salvageable. We need a new system designed from the ground up to be fast and efficient. Too bad internet2 probably wont be that for home users for many years to come. Even if we all get DSL, our packets will not be routed in a reasonable manner. Traceroute your connection to your favorite websites and you'll see what I mean.. you never know when your packets will reach the next bottleneck.

  • Surely this is no more Internet-2 then the UK's JANet (Joint Academic Network) was Internet-1. It's an educational WAN. Is it available fully internationally (Europe wide as well as USA and Singapore)? Does it link businesses as well as educational establishments? Are there plans to allow individual access?

    Whether they like it or not, it can't be considered a true INTER-Net until it has individuals on it, with all the problems that creates, until it is open access then it is simply a Private WAN. Big deal. Mobil Corp have WAN Links. So does IBM. Are these Internet-3 and Internet-4. Can we all have our own Internets? Someone will need to establish a naming convention if we can!

  • Re:All this bandwidth only for colleges... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Could you be more specific as to why the I1 (the current Internet) is badly designed ?
  • Hmm, weird. At our school, I2 seems to just work for anything on the schoolwide lan. I can ftp off metalab (sunsite) at 2.4 mbps. Somewhat close to lan speeds. There is a total os something like 12 mbps available for regular internet, so this has to be going over I2. I've had a few of these going before. So unless I have godlike power over the incoming bandwidth, I assume I'm using it

    (Well, there is that and my boss told me I was )
  • Let me correct myself... I dont think the current inernet was poorly designed, it just wasnt designed to accomodate every man woman and child on this planet downloading their favorite Britney Speares(sp?) mp3s at the same time. I think the best hope for salvaging this internet is compression technology, honestly. I think there is a lot of room for better and faster compression schemes to take over.
  • Becausing routing systems are currently illogical. Even if your website is connected to a major backbone, you may have quite a few hops before you reach that backbone. If it is off of the backbone, you may go through dozens of routers before reaching your final destination. This makes it extremely difficult for end-users of the internet to share data effeciently since they are obviously not on any backbone. Ive had experiences where its taken dozens of hops just to get to a person who is a few blocks away. Im very sleepy, so my explanation may not be very technical or very good at all. Please, somebody with a degree in networking step in here and help me out. :)

  • Some more stuff... (Score:5)

    by bocee ( 20173 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @02:13AM (#1403021) Homepage
    My school (Johns Hopkins) is part of the internet 2, and unlike what a previous poster said, all computers have automatic access to it. I don't have access to my computer at school now (the school shut down the network for y2k...) but if I traceroute a host on any member network, for example www.mit.edu, traffic goes through through vbns.net routers (the i2 routers). (Normal traffic doesn't go through the vbns.net routers.) I haven't done much with it, but friends have reported rates of almost 1MB/sec to other member schools.

    Some links:
    vbns network map [vbns.net]
    Internet 2 connected schools [internet2.edu]
  • Hey, what about mp3's ;)
  • How else would you do it though, without every system being directly connected to every other? Each system can only have direct connections to so many others, and so to reach a system beyond it's immediate peers, some sort of routing will be required.
  • Damn it! I get more and more pissed everytime I hear about some new, higher-bandwith connection being availibe.

    There is no way in hell that Charter Communications will ever get around to putting in a able modems in my area. It seems that their recent buyout by AT&T has let their plans fall behind schedule!

  • That's the Internet II, eh? (Score:3)

    by Deosyne ( 92713 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @02:25AM (#1403025)
    Sounds more like marketing hype than anything. What makes the Internet the Internet and not just another large WAN is the fact that anyone can jump on and become a part of it. Perhaps someday this will become Internet II, but right now its just an invitation only high-speed WAN. So if I create a new network that move info a bit faster than "Internet II" and hook up a few machines to it, I can call it Internet III, right? Bah, I'm not impressed; they may as well sell their network to Microsoft just to make sure its run by folks who are expert in running things their way and shutting anyone else who won't improve their bottom line out.

    Yes, I undertstand that it would take something on the order of the US national debt to upgrade the Internet to "Internet II" capabilities, but it seems pretty damned precocious for them to be calling their new toy Internet II when the only thing it shares in similarity to the Internet is that it connects computers. But, of course, it will be highly praised because it serves a loftier purpose and doesn't cater to those pathetic outsiders. To quote the article: I-2 is only currently available to institutions of higher learning, and organizers don't see that changing any time soon. The whole idea is to take down roadblocks from the first Internet, like heavy traffic and slow interfaces, and speed things up for college researchers sharing information. Yeah, I'm still having nightmares about those slow-as-molasses connections that I got while I was attending a community college; took me damn near an hour to pull down a 300 MB iso on that slow beast.

    I've got nothing against these colleges using the insane amounts of money that they make to build themselves up the geek equivalent of the good-ole-boy network, but labeling it "Internet II" makes me want to wretch from the oily marketing feel of the whole project. Hey, more power to them; in a few years, they'll start trickling their discarded leftovers to the rest of the world and we might begin to see improvements in the real Internet. *shrug*

    Deosyne
  • Isn't the correct symbol for the Internet a fluffy cloud? It always was on the diagrams I saw. Maybe I2 should be a sheep (a cloud with legs...).
  • 1MB/s is relatively slow. I constantly get 4-5MB/s when I transfer data between schools in Sweden (SUNET). So if this Internet2 doesn't handle more than 1MB/s, I'm not very impressed at all.


  • The Internet is chunked up according to business boundaries when ideally it should be organised along geographic boundaries. Are there any existing business models for Internet "services" that are also compatible with geography?

  • I ][.

    Ok, maybe not. :)

    ---

  • And you though quake was cool! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Found this site awhile ago. It seams this is one of the projects using the I2. Do not be fooled the date of the pages... Multidimensional Applications and Gigabit Internetwork Consortium (MAGIC) [magic.net] was the first use. MAGIC-II is now being done. On the I2, the displays are pulled over the wire real time, designed for battle. But you can try this at home -- if you have a Indy and SOME disk space.
  • What makes the Internet the Internet and not just another large WAN is the fact that anyone can jump on and become a part of it.

    What you fail to understand is that that isn't how the Internet was back when it was academia-mostly. But it was still called the Internet then, too, while the rest of the world was subjected to IPX, SNA, OSI and all that.

    oily marketing feel

    How can something that is not "for sale" have a marketing feel?

  • Sorry, which boundaries are you talking about? Physical ones? Domain names?

  • I2 is quite because.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The network is non-routeable. Institutions apply for membership. Once a member you can apply for PVCs to other institutions. Not to mention that the average connection is an OC-3 and not too many organizations have the funds for that. I2 is also very NOT commercial so it's not mainstream. Here [nysernet.org] is some news about I2's expansion in New York State. Cheers! Big Jilm
  • Actually now that Janet is being replaced with the much faster Super-Janet (I don't know how this compares to Internet II in terms of speed, but it is much more widely available than I2) I am beginning to suspect that calling this network "Internet 2" is just a clever piece of marketing. It is just another large-scale fast private network, they are not rare.

    --

  • ``And there's more: New Improved Internet II connects seamlessly to the existing Internet...'' because they use the same protocols, right?

    I saw no evidence in the article that they are running anything other than IPv4 over this fat network. Or doing anything "interesting". I'm sure it's a lovely part of the Internet to be on, but that's all.

  • there was a cnn article a while back about canada doing something with pure fibre. they were able to get the entire contents of the library of congress from one end of canada to the other in less than 1sec using fibre with 8coours of light, and said they were working on improving it to use 2,000 colours of light for a supposed bandwidth of 2-3 Tbps. this is probably old news to most of us, but there is a point here(someplace).

    all of the "Superfast Unobtainable Internet Connections(TM)" are just that; unobtainable.

    most of us are still on 56k, and some on 33.6 or worse.

    even with cable and dsl well into the public allready, this technology is worthless to us unless we have a super-beowolf cluster doing DNA research as an excuse to get it.

    ill be happy when i @home removes that 128kilobit cap on my upstream.

  • What you fail to understand is that that isn't how the Internet was back when it was academia-mostly. But it was still called the Internet then, too, while the rest of the world was subjected to IPX, SNA, OSI and all that.

    Yes, but that is not what the internet is now, everything has moved on, and now Internet is used to refer to the interconnection of computers globally, with few restrictions on who can be part of it. Private versions are sometimes called intranets - why isn't this just an academic intranet? Acanet anyone?

    How can something that is not "for sale" have a marketing feel?

    Same reason as above - WHY did they call it Internet-2 if it does not, and is not intended to, resemble the CURRENT Internet(-1). If they want to keep it back as an Acadamic-only system, why give it a name that implies different? It doesn't really matter what the Internet originally was (why not call it Arpanet-2? That is also where it's roots lie) - they have chosen a publicity-seeking name, even if that wasn't their attention, although it would be hard to believe that was the case.

  • I think Al's finishing up the router configurations. It will be up soon.


    That's what I love about them high-school girls. I get older, they stay the same age... yes they do.
    --Wooderson 1976

  • One of the goals of Internet 2 that is useful (IMO, anyway) is a test platform for very high-speed applications.

    It's all very well developing some very shiny technologies that 'should work' when they have enough WAN bandwidth, but it's another thing entirely to do real-world testing on them.

    Things like developing the protocols to send HDTV over the network need a real live network like this (to test human factors in development as much as technical), so it's really not just "to take down roadblocks from the first Internet, like heavy traffic and slow interfaces, and speed things up for college researchers sharing information".

  • The FibreSphere (Score:5)

    by LL ( 20038 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @03:13AM (#1403040)
    People might be interested in reading George Gilder's "The Coming of the FibreSphere [upenn.edu]". Basically he calims that you can substitute mass cheap bandwidth for switches (which being electronic only add latency) creating a design of dark fibre with all the intelligence at the peripheral. Now while this may appeal to customers, certain telcos suddenly find themselves in the commodity bandwidth business with nothing to support their big expensive time-based, distance-function bills. Guess what their natural response is? How can they justify the $n per megabyte when they can't control the marginal costs and thus segment the market by imposing deliberate latencies or constraints. Remember that in the IT industry, the value migrates to the complex and difficult areas (e.g. CPU, complex software) so with companies investing in voice-activated smart phones, they lose control unless they can corner any new markets and introduce delaying tactics. Why bother with switching when you can tune to 1 of thousands of fibre frequencies, especially when you can't use more than a few hundred home shopping categories anyway. Anyway, the hope is that by giving the smart universities some taste of what is possible, they will develop bandwidth-hungry applications that will drive consumer demand and thus make large-scale cost effective infrastructure investment. Life will be interesting.

    It is rather interesting that the base human desires seem to dominate new technology. I've heard an urban ledgend that the vibrator was the third patented invention that used the new minature electric motors (after sewing machine and something else I can't recall at the moment), the porn industry is leading with DVD and the porn sites (and gambling) are one of the few profitable internet enterprises. Not sure whether this is a commentary on applied technology or human nature though :-).

    LL
  • Quite amusingly, has anyone noticed just how slow www.internet2.edu [internet2.edu] really is?

  • It seems clear that I2 will be closed to "general public" for some time, then I wonder how this could affect the life of those who (like me) are already out of campus life.

    I wonder if the text content available through I2 will be the same as the one we can reach by means of the Internet. It would be sad if I1 and I2 servers were separated and scientists decided to give a higher priority to I2 material (which they probably would), and we couldn't access new papers and so on. I believe servers will be separated (if not yet) for security reasons. If they aren't, someone may hack a way to use an I2 connection at some university through poor-cousin internet. The bandwidth bottleneck would still exist, but people would do it, either for the fun of it or for malicious reasons. (Disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to do that.)

    On the good side, I see this as, if not an embryo, at least a test bed for something that will be needed sooner or later: a replacement for the internet as we know it. The experience gathered with I2 will be a very usefull when the time comes to draw the standards for such a replacement. Intelligent routing, for instance, is a wonderfull idea.

    As someone has already posted in a funny way, the small bandwidth relief originated by students using I2 instead of I1(?) is pretty welcome too!


    -------------------------

  • This is what visio alows you to use. No point sticking to its conventions ;-) They are not bad but better notation may be used/invented.
  • Sorry if i'm a little behind, but just what is Internet 2? I've only heard it meantioned on here once before.
  • My super-precise calculations indicate that 50% of the world's bandwidth is currently wasted on college students playing quake. The other 50% is college students downloading pr0n. Therefore, if all the colleges of the world start using internet2, we will all have super fast connections too since they will not be downloading pr0n and playing quake on our internet!! yay internet2!! ;)

    Well personnaly i think its colleges right to do that, the internet was developed in large part at the universites :) Please don't take me too seriously either on this.
  • > How else would you do it though, without every system being directly connected to every other? Each system can
    > only have direct connections to so many others

    ATM networking is the answert to this.
    Connection-oriented networking - every system does
    get a (virtual) connection to the others.

    And ATM could be used for distributing all those
    MP3s mentioned below.

  • And how are these virtual connections routed between systems that are not directly connected? Back to square one.
  • Number of hops in ipV4 is absoultely irrelevant to what you getr as reachability and bandwidth. It is relevant only in ipv6 where it replaces time to live.

    A typical case when more hops is better is going from west coast to west coast between two providers with a public peering in MAE-West and a private peering somewhere else. If your packet goes via Mae West (lowest number of hops) it has a very good chance to get into congestion. So everyone is sending it via private peerings if available. And they may be on the other side of the US. Overall - more hops but faster and lower packet loss.

    Overall, you are kind'a clueless... Read some books on routing architecture or the NANOG archives...
  • SuperJANET is a 155Mbps ATM network linking
    colleges and universities in England and Wales.

    It links both individual institutions at 34 or
    155Mbps and MANs (such as the London MAN etc).


    http://www.ja.net


    Also, all the universities in Scotland are connected via a 155Mbps ATM network.
    They use this, and have been using it, for near
    broadcast quality videoconferencing via ATM codecs
    (http://www.cellstack.com),
    just like the goals of this Internet 2 project
    (Only we're doing it right now in Scotland,
    but somehow we Scots don't trumpet our achievements to the world).
  • > Actually now that Janet is being replaced with the much faster Super-Janet

    IIRC, they're up to Super-JANET 3 now ...

    Least ways, back in 1997 when I had a job interview with Warwick University they had a Super-JANET 2 connection and where looking towards getting Super-JANET 3. (But then there where something of the 4(?) backbone usenet news hosts for JANET!).

    (All of that is subject to being filtered through my exceedingly bad memory!)
  • OK!

    So packet networks are BAD and connection-oriented networks are GOOD, I seam to recall hearing that somewhere before.

    I guess ATM networks are really good at keeping track of billions and billions of "virtual" connections, and a lot quicker to connect up new computer, to all other computers on "the ATM" than the Internet.

  • What he means is, why is the /. story icon for the Internet a ring network.
  • MP3s are already compressed. I believe decompressing data be too much overhead for slower machines. (Possible DoS attack.) Decoding an MP3 on my old P75 slowed it to a crawl.
  • You can find all about it at the following link [internet2.org]

    Interesting is that it is only open to US universities and that they need to cough up $25,000 membership fees and an investment of about $500,000 a year.

    Throug Memoranda of Understandings Internet2 has teamed up with similar organisations across the globe. So though it might be silent, it cannot be said that the organisation is not among the living anymore.

  • True, it's using java. But, since java is becomeing an open source, Microsoft will undoubtably snap it up and kleuge it up with bloated BS so that you'll have to use their "MSTCP-IP".
    I just gave myself chills. I better quit while I'm ahead and go to work. Peace.
  • I dunno about Godlike power, but my school is one of the members, and, well, our connection sucks. I'm lucky if I get 10-20k/s during peak hours (14:00-00:00 EST), it's usually not much better than a dialup account during those times.

    I believe it is the gateway server out of the dorms -- I'm not sure what kind of machine it is, but it seems to drop packets like it's nooone's business. It makes playing Quake very difficult, with 25% packetloss.

    Now that I found out that our school's an I2 member, I might just have to e-mail the admins here and ask (in more polite terms, of course) "wtf is going on d00ds???" =)

  • No it's not.. oh, I've got them turned off...
  • I don't think that creating "bandwidth-hungry applications" is the optimal way to increase bandwidth. That's like saying that MS Word is great because it forces people to buy bigger CPUs!
  • Keeping in mind that the original Internet trickled down to us little people much after initial development, here are some tidbits about the I2 project from the Internet2 FAQ found here [internet2.edu].

    1. One goal is for advanced internet tech development and for application development for vital for research.

    2. Universities (and some comercial partners) are taking the lead on the project considering that they need the resources that this project is working on creating - advanced tech and apps.

    3. Cost for being part of I2 70 million per year for the universities (I think that is for all, not each). Additional funding, 30 million over the time of I2 creation from commercial sector, and unspecified amounts from NSF and other R&D grant making organizations.

    4. What about getting in on it? Uni's that are not currently part of it can join if they have the funds to make the investment. The tech is expensive now but should come down into reach.

  • Re:That's the Internet II, eh? (Score:4)

    by EricWright ( 16803 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @04:18AM (#1403064) Journal
    Yup, that's it. Higher bandwidth, reserved for the people who developed the internet in the first place, in the pre-"public" days.

    There are good reasons to have a segment of the internet (or whatever the fsck you want to call a bunch of machines connected by fiber optics with the purpose of sharing data) reserved for academia. One, it was the academics that developed it to begin with. Two, do you have any idea the amount of data people in academia need to transfer? Probably not... I do.

    When I was working on my PhD, I was performing large, 3D simulations on one of the Cray's at the NCSC. The data files for those simulations totaled 4.5 GB per simulation. For completeness, I had to run several of these simulations. Can you imagine how long it would have taken to download all that data on the same lines that all the "commercial users" use? Weeks or months. Even with I-2 access, it took me a couple of hours to download data from each of these simulations.

    Now, before you start whining about preferential treatment of academics, ask yourself this question: Does (pick your {least?} favorite average user) *need* to download GBs of pr0n and mp3s? Does the academic's job depend on being able to access GBs of scientific data? My answers are No! and Yes! in that order...

    My $1.47

    Eric
  • When doing new things, someone has to try it first.
    If you do it in the commercial market, the first question is "who gets the profit". This severely hampers some kinds of innovation (like the Internet itself).
    Giving adequate bandwidth cheaply to people who are not your competitors is possible, and allows the innovation to occur that will tell the rest of us what to use that bandwidth for when we can get it.
  • You are correct. As soon as AOL let loose, things went downhill. It as a big negative step function. The internet would be much better off without AOL. High binary traffic, spam, pedophiles, ... , you name it. The potential for these problems was there from the git-go but once AOL unleased it's minions, these problems leapt to the fore. Add to that so many companies setting up shop. No wonder the net ain't what it used to be.
  • the data could just be mirrored. If there's demand for the data, they will be provided.
  • Although MS Word and the Win* monstrosities likely lead the way to buy bigger hard drives and more memory, IMO it was the desire for better games that drove the consumer demand for better processors. Of course, Intel's (and Apple's, at one time) marketing department gets much of the credit there too.

  • http://www.internet2.edu (Score:4)

    by OldHawk777 ( 19923 ) <oldhawk777&gmail,com> on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @04:49AM (#1403073) Journal
    Well what is internet-2?

    "Reality is a self-induced hallucination."

    To some in education it is an education internet.

    To some in the military it is a DARPA internet project.

    To some in business it is the future of the B-B eBusiness world internet.

    I can not speak for internet-2, but I can say what I think ("AFT").

    Internet-2 is a project with the intent to provide a developmental space for "Things to come.". Significantly greater bandwidth, vastly improved bandwidth utilization, resource management and control, and most importantly a truely enhanced functions and features rich environment for all internet users.

    Internet-2 is advancing, discovering, and developing what will pe part of the future internet ... Distance Learning, TeleMedicine, TeleMaintenance, Collaboratiive Research and Science, VTC, ... Knowledgebase - automated Data collection, manipulation, interpretation, distribution, ....

    Anyway this is a little of the way I look at the intent for the future internet. PLEASE, do not make the mistake of interpreting anything I said as a "1984 - Big Brother" concept. The future internet will be for the people just like today's internet. Dang Good Stuff on it's way to US folks and y'all. I just read about this stuff ... I'm no expert (just interested).

    WISE-YES and APES
  • The interesting thing about internet 2 is that there is no provision for upgrading it. They just lobbied for all this money to build a super fast network but lacked any incentive to upgrade it. When it first came out it was monumental: 200k/sec downloads. Since then internet 1 has far surpassed internet 2 with 600k/sec downloads. Clearly, competition has driven internet 1 while not just a lack of competition but restricting use to academia has locked internet 2.
  • Not if you put "Internet 2" in quotes.
  • Well wasn't that precisely his point?

  • Re:Thinking as an I1 user (Score:3)

    by Solemn Bob ( 16065 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @05:05AM (#1403082) Homepage
    It seems clear that I2 will be closed to "general public" for some time, then I wonder how this could affect the life of those who (like me) are already out of campus life.

    I think perhaps you misunderstand what I2 is. You're not alone: it's a FAQ [internet2.edu]: Internet2 is not a physical network that will replace the Internet. Rather, Internet2's goal is to bring together institutions and resources to develop new technologies and capabilities that can then be deployed in the global Internet. Universities will maintain, and continue to experience substantial growth in the use of, existing Internet connections, which they will still obtain from commercial providers.

    The point is, anything available on Internet2 is available to everyone; the only difference is that when packets are sent inside I2, they're routed a bit differently. While I'm talking, here's my response (quoting again from the FAQ) to the accusation that the whole idea is elitist and intended to take back the Internet away from grubby corporate interests: A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector.

    There is no conspiracy here to disenfranchise the non-academic user.

  • It is rather interesting that the base human desires seem to dominate new technology

    It's really simple. Those who were not obsessed with sex didn't survive -- they didn't breed fast enough or often enough. Darwinian evolution, survival of the fittest, you know...

    Kaa
  • So are you saying that you would prefer the crustier, exclusive, countable-node Internet of pre-1994 to today's looser, accessible, and ever-expanding Net?

    Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of geeks, nerds, academics, scholars, and accelerated students having a mode of communication over which they can share information (and ultimately, commune) without added noise from web spiders, *@aol.com, MMF, spam, and pron-hocking sites. But I think you can do most of this over the Internet as it stands.

    The poster is right to say that 'Internet 2' is a misleading name, because it gives the impression that someday, reasonably soon, the lumbering Internet being widely used today will be rebuilt with Internet 2 technology, the same way Amtrak might like to replace its old lumbering rail system with Acela technology, or the way the phone companies have mostly replaced the old analog system with a digital system, or the way car companies have replaced catalytic converters with fuel injectors. But the word is that it probably wont.

    The goal/purpose of Internet 2, as it seems to stand, is to replace the academic backbone that the 'original' Internet once was. Despite geek wistfulness and a tenacity to history, it really should be called something else. Cable TV wasn't called Television 2, nor was FM radio called Radio-2. These both served the same purposes as their originals, and have come to largely replace them, just as Internet 2 is wont to do for the institutional origins of Internet 1.

    But for the detractors of the new exclusive networks like I-2 and U2, have no fear. Someday (if not already), bofh.forsale will be created and it will all start to come crumbling down, again.
  • Just a note, one of the most interesting spellings of that word that I have seen. Do Germans pronounce it cloige?
  • Dunno about jhu, but neu has been part of I2 for about three years or so, and I never did anything with it or even see a computer that was attached to it. NEU has pretty much kept the rest of their net separate.

    Possibly grad CS students in the new corporate research center get to play with it, but those are few and far; the main CS resources are enough for most students' projects involving things like FTP'ing large 3D data files, even if they do have to start it at 9PM and come back at 8Am to see the results. (After all, that's the way it was on the old Internet, too.)

    Most of the CS research being done on I-2 there seem to be testing new high-speed protocols, not taking advantage of the speed for shipping monumentous research data in convenient amounts of time. (Besides, most of yall get 6 more weeks per term than NEU does. Plenty of time to finish your research.)

    Other than that, a programmer turned sociology professor that I've done projects with has mentioned that they are also doing human-network interaction research with I-2.

    Traceroutes from neu to mit go though BBN, just like you would expect.
  • your connection sucks because you are not on Internet 2. Just because your university is, doesnt mean you are. The whole point is to keep off recreational use - if you have to ask "what happened to Internet 2?" then the chances are you won't ever get on.
    --
  • The class was taught by Dr. Larry Landweber and
    Dr. Jun Murai. Pretty cool class -- I was in it
    and helped with the technical side for the last
    "lecture" (dignitaries talking about how cool it was). Basically, take IPv6, multicast, and 40Mb/sec and see what you can do with it A/V wise.
    There was an article in the NYT on it (don't have the link, it was in the 30DEC99 "Circuits" section).

    And what's that "heaven help Japan" comment supposed to mean?

    Drew
  • It makes playing Quake very difficult, with 25% packetloss.

    Sounds like the system is working very well. University bandwidth isn't wasted between rival dorms. Sucks for you, works well for the people who need the bandwidth.
  • So are you saying that you would prefer the crustier, exclusive, countable-node Internet of pre-1994 to today's looser, accessible, and ever-expanding Net?

    No. But there obviously are people who do. (The same holds for the spam-free, invitation-only Usenet 2.)

    Despite geek wistfulness and a tenacity to history, it really should be called something else.

    Why? It uses the same technology - protocols et al - which, if you read the RFCs, define Internet nodes. It's called "Internet 2" because it's a separate entity - don't just think that numbers mean sequels. This is not a movie.

  • 'Bad design' and Internet II speed (Score:4)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @05:41AM (#1403099)
    The Internet was rather well designed if you take account of the fact that it was initially intended only to share data and provide remote access between academic institutions, and not many of them at that. Now it has grown beyond all imagining, yet it still works using essentially the same protocols - a mark of good design IMO.

    As for I-2, it will be IPv6 based, but contrary to popular opinion IPv6 is not automagically faster or better than IPv4 - while v6 has many nice features such as autoconfiguration, auto-addressing, large address space, etc, there are very few features designed to make things go faster. All the technologies listed below apply equally to IPv6 and IPv4:

    - MPLS - Multiprotocol Label Switching - allows administrator fine tuning of the routes taken across the network, e.g. to balance loads over the whole network, can also be used for VPNs and QoS.

    - DiffServ - Differentiated Services - lets you assign a priority level to every packet (e.g. gold, silver, basic) and make gold packets get some guaranteed bandwidth or lower latency, hop by hop. Easy to deploy, does not give cast iron QoS guarantees.

    - IntServ and RSVP - Integrated Services and Resource Reservation Protocol - lets applications request a certain QoS (bandwidth, latency, etc.) end to end across a network. Harder to deploy across a network, and has scalability problems, but these are gradually being addressed and it does give end to end guarantees.

    There is one neat feature in IPv6 that supports RSVP - it's called the Flow Label, and is basically a number that is assigned to all packets in a given 'flow' (e.g. a video session). By assigning this number, RSVP routers after the first one in the path can go somewhat faster since they only need to look at one field rather than checking src/dest IP addresses/ports.

    Windows 2000 includes many QoS features, particularly RSVP/IntServ and DiffServ, but not IPv6. RSVP is available for Linux, IPv6 is available in early form, and the Linux-DiffServ project is one of the most advanced implementations of DiffServ that is publicly available.

    For more information on QoS, see http://www.qosforum.com/docs/glossary/glossary.htm - this has useful links at the end. For IPv6, see http://www.ipv6.org/.

    Of course, the ability to send traffic over big fat optical pipes is available to v4 and v6. However, the cost of ASICs probably dictates that gigabit/terabit routers may only support IPv4 for some time, until v6 becomes more widely deployed. However, I-2 may well be using early versions of v6 gigabit routers.

  • "Too bad internet2 probably wont be that for home users for many years to come."

    *sigh* You missed the point. If Internet2 gets clogged up with consumer junk like Internet1 did, the schools will start lobbying to build Internet3 so they can get some work done.

    If you want public packet communication to be fast and efficient, tell your ISP how much you'd pay for fast and efficient. If enough people do this, they'll get it.
  • I worked at CWRU, which is one of the charter schools, and our regular internet feed was an OC-3. The I2 feed I think will start out at an OC-3, and was eventually to move to an OC-12 (622Mb/s). Unfortunately, OARNet, the Ohio Educational 'net provider has only OC-3 trunks, so probly not. The gigapops are aptly named. The coolest thing about working on that campus was that we had ATM everywhere, and ATM is the key tech on I2.

  • Re: it's not THAT interesting. (Score:3)

    by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @05:47AM (#1403103) Homepage
    Look at what the connection prices are for an OC3 of connectivity, and $25k setup, $40k/month isn't really that much.

    We'll assume I2 is much like a Tier1 provider on the currect system the rest of us are stuck with.

    here's a few prices (from boardwatch.com) (the highest bandwidth listed from each backbone)

    UUNET : 155Mbps = $179k/month
    C&W : 21Mbps = $20.8k/month
    GTE : 45Mbps = $55k/month
    Sprint 155Mbps = 160k/month

    I mean, you can't just hook people up, even if you are non-profit, without having some staffing, routers, utility & housing costs, etc.


  • Since when does the word "Internet" have any reference to users, much less require "individuals"? (what's an individual anyway?) Internet is just that - an inter-network network. That is, it is a network that connects subnetworks. This term was chosen because the Internet connects thousands of organizations and their networks together. The Internet 2 also connects many organizations' networks, just not as many (and more selective) as Internet 1.

    Oh dear. You disagree with me, so I'm stupid. Get out of bed the wrong side?

    Now to address your points:

    internet (small i) is taken to mean a network that connects other networks, which fits your argument.

    Internet (small I) is taken to mean THE Internet, which is a network that is publically available and (amongst other purposes) transfers mail, files and information. As such, Internet-2 is a direct referral to the current Internet (big I) and that IS available to individuals (an individual is exactly what it says it is, look it up in a dictionary if you don't know what an individual is). So yes, within the currently understood context, "Internet" does have reference to being available to individuals.

    Your argument would carry more weight if 1) you didn't insult people as part of it and 2) you posted from an account rather than anonymously

  • True, it's almost all research. Why waste the bandwitdh for people downloading crap from the web. I helped hook up a SGI Origin2000 to use I2 at the school I attended (and later worked at). The professor (materials science) was doing some massive calculations on thermal/fluid dynamics for plastic injection molding, metal forming, etc... He was using the Origin to render results coming back from a big NSF CPU farm. Keep in mind that the Origin had four load balancing OC-3 cards in it only because Fore dropped support of the OC-12 cards for SGI. This guy was moving many many Gigs of data across the network. Not something I'd try on I1...

    D-rock
  • I2 is basically what the internet was back in the 80s and early 90s, before the web took over.

    So I2 is now a haven for cheesy little Gopher servers, FTP sites with the latest patches for XTrek, and a sandbox for little toy projects from disgruntled CS professors and their grad student lackies? Sign me up!! Seriously, you say that as if what was happening on the Internet in the late '80s-early '90s was somehow better than what you can do with the Internet now.

    The truth is that there was no common standard for data interchange beyond a flat ASCII file. TeX documents were the norm and to read them, you had to print them out. There was no way to build collaborative systems short of cobbling together a bunch of homemade C code and trying to convince others to use it. And the AVERAGE bandwidth of the Internet "backbone" was sub-T1.

    Anyone who longs for the "golden days" of the Internet either wasn't there, or isn't participating in today's net in any meaningful way. It just wasn't that exciting.

  • Re:All this bandwidth only for colleges... (Score:3)

    by aphr0 ( 7423 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @05:59AM (#1403108)
    /*Too bad internet2 probably wont be that for home users for many years to come.*/

    No! Keep the average person OFF of i2. I2 is there for very (very. 30fps full quality video and sound) high bandwidth applications which absolutely requite obscene bandwidth and QoS. What does Joe Net really need with i2? Nothing. He just wants his mp3s and porn and AOL. The internet already provides him with everything he needs.

    The same goes for slashdot geeks. Only a select few have any business having access to i2.

    I want students and researchers having the best quality i2 they can get. They are the ones who need it the most, not every silly bastard with an @home account.
  • IMO, the problem is not home users, per se. And the problem is not lame-assed ISP's like AOL either, or even web-tv. The problem is the commercial use of the internet.

    The web did not kill the "net as we used to know it" - filling the web with advertising did. Many of the newsgroups that have been abandoned have been abandoned due to spam.

    I have little hope for I-2, myself - the corporate sponsor thing is indicative of the intention to use it for the same commercial crap filling up the original internet.

    As long as any network allows commercial advertising, the signal-to-noise ratio will suck.

  • The UK one isn't more than 155Mbps???

    The swedish equivalent (Sunet [sunet.se]) is also at 155Mbps, but something tells me it's user base is somewhat smaller... or is it? Maybe the UK universities don't grant their students free 10Mbps connections. (Great for quake *grin*)

    An aside: the finnish one, aside from being bloody fast, has the best name: FUNET!
    -
  • Uh, TTL is essentially number of hops in v4, since it gets decremented once a second or whenever a hop occurs, whichever happens first..and hops are almost always less than a second long. Traceroute, in fact, depends on this behavior.

    Daniel
  • Where do you think most of this activity is
    happening? With Joe Suburb that takes two minutes
    to download a song over a 56K line or Joe College
    who can do it in a couple seconds?
  • survival of the sluttiest, eh?

  • Yup, definitely academics... (Score:3)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @06:26AM (#1403116) Homepage Journal
    ...who else could come up with this profound statement.

    "Students are actually using the Internet to learn about networking," explains Greg Wood Director of the Internet II Project

    who'da thunk it?

  • Find out for yourself... (Score:3)

    by Sanjuro ( 9253 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @06:27AM (#1403118)
    http://www.ouhsc.edu/it/digicomm/int ernet2.asp [ouhsc.edu] --Some stuff I collected for our website when I worked in the networking department at the medical school at OU; provides an example of how a research institution is actually handling an I2 connection.

    http://www.internet2.edu [internet2.edu] -- The main website for the project.


    I have seen many comments that seem to equate I2 with a "private WAN" for universities. I think a better description would be that member institutions have private peering, i.e. I am at the University of Oklahoma, and I have traffic that needs to go to hotmail.com, it gets routed through ONENET then off to Cable and Wireless, etc. If I have traffic that needs to go to MIT, it gets routed through the Abilene network and off to the MBONE. Individual PCs on our campus network do not have to "subscribe" as the University pays something on the order of $30K per month to be a member institution.

    Incidentally, a happy side effect is that I could theoretically get ridiculous ping times from the dorms at OU to a QIII server at Stanford, since many institutions I know of will not be crazy enough to try to filter what traffic goes on the I2 link. (Most of the POPs will be at something like OC12 @ 622Mbps)
  • It's an educational WAN. Is it available fully internationally (Europe wide as well as USA and Singapore)? Does it link businesses as well as educational establishments? Are there plans to allow individual access?

    I recall CNN doing a piece on "Internet 2" in 1995. They claimed that we'd all be using the newer, more highspeed internet 2 around now. The problem is that Universities don't want all the average grubbies on their private highspeed WAN.

    Thing back to the early 1980s. The internet was a rather large research project, mixing military and educational computers, and allowing them to share data. Then the "great unwashed" and Big Business (tm) gradually found out about it, and started using it. At this point, the universities recognized that they needed a new architecture, free from some of the original design flaws of the internet, and free from some of the less desirable people (script kiddies, anyone?). Internet 2 also allows them to test and implement new things. Gigabit routers, IPv6, etc.

    Their developments will trickle down to the internet, but don't hold your breath for general access.
    ---
  • Folks, I just wanted to try to clear up some confusion. As a student at an Internet 2 institution (yes, we know how to use computers down south! :)), I think I can help a little bit.

    First, Internet 2 is not necessarily a general-purpose network. It is used primarily for research in high-performance computing and really cool stuff like telemedicine and video multicast conferences.

    Second, you can't get pr0n or mp3's or things like that from the network unless they're hosted at a member institution's site. You can't connect to the regular internet from I2. Can you imagine NCSA hosting the most realistic "virtual girlfriend" simulation? Well, okay, maybe not a great example :).

    Third, the new applications and experience gained from Internet 2 could be well applied in the future on the Next generation Internet [ngi.gov]. This is where regular folks can get the advantages of a high-speed network and maybe not even know it.

    Of course, I'm crazy about anything that's new and "neat," as I'm sure most people reading this are. However, I can't wait to (maybe, just maybe) get to work with this project and help develop things that might lead to better science, better global connections, and Quake II games that don't slow down... er.. anyway. -AC
    Allen Cain
  • Students here at Penn State (where I just graduated from) have access to the Internet2 from anywhere in the university's network. Packets destined for other universities on the VBNS (Internet2) are routed through the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center and over Internet2. However, there are two connections to the PSC, a DS-3 and a new OC-3. The students (and mostly everyone else who's not doing special research) get the DS-3, which also routes traffic to the commercial internet...still, I was able to max out the 10Mbit ethernet in my dorm.

    In fact, I'm still running RH 5.2 (2.2.13-rtl2.0) which I downloaded from uiuc and installed in fifteen minutes when I was on campus last spring...
  • I just now realized I said MBONE when I meant to say VBNS...9am is still early for me. :)
  • Not So Here, at the university that I work For, All Internet and I2 traffic is sent to the same router. The router then decides which pipe that the data flows down. I can access high speed downloads from any educational or partner site that has been connected to the network. I have been able to get downloads of almost 100MB/s from the next nearest university. This thing flies.

  • try it with a 4:1 conversion rate, takes up 90% cpu on an old 486, but it works

    at 441khz No stereo, only mono.....
    at 22khz you can get stereo, although sound quality sucks...

  • kl-ew-geh.... (I tried to write it phonetically)
  • Personally, I'm beginning to hate the internet

    There are too many commercial entities on the internet ruining what was supposed to be an educational and community oriented backbone.

    What was supposed to be an open platform, has been closed up by greedy corporations. People with ideologies that are 180deg out from the ideologies of people that created the internet.

    I'm not just referring to those corps that "close" the protocols and standards, but also those that "close" the flow of freedom (such as the resent lawsuits over domain names, et al.)

    It just makes my ill.....

  • Remember what disk space and RAM used to cost before Windoze 9x? Just because you're not part of the waste, it doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the economy-of-scale that it creates.


    ---
  • I haven't read all the comments so I hope I'm not repeating what someone else has already said, but where I attend school (the University of Alabama in Huntsville) the research professors and other researchers have access to Internet II. It appears in the news fairly often around here, but I haven't heard anything about it in a couple months. Now if I can find a way to get them to route it to the dorm...

  • Comment from someone directly involved (Score:3)

    by adenied ( 120700 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2000 @07:45AM (#1403130)
    Thought I'd make some comments since I was directly involved in this project.

    This wasn't just a one time deal, it was actually a series of scheduled lectures, some originating in Japan, others originating in the US. On the US side, the professor teaching the class was Prof. Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin Madison, one of the people who helped create CSNet back in ArpaNet days. On the Japan side it was Prof. Jun Murai at Keio University who is often refered to as the Internet guru in Japan. Larry and Jun are good friends and had been wanting to do something like this for a while.

    The lectures themselves were basically video-conferences. Using Sony DV equipment, the audio and video streams were sent across Internet/2 infrastructure. Someone mentioned that they didn't see what this has to do with IPv6. The Internet/2 on its own doesn't, however, this project utilized IPv6 going over ATM. There was no compression used in this, so bandwidth usage was around 35-40 Mbps. For the most part, it worked very well with amazing video and audio quality.

    I've been told that this was the first time that regularly scheduled video content was sent from the US to Asia over the Internet/2. It was amazing to see it work. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to e-mail me.

    Sam Etler
    UW Madison
    CSL Networking

  • It's interesting to read what Dave Farber, recently Named FCC Chief Technologist [slashdot.org], has to say about Internet 2. You can read his position paper [upenn.edu] on Internet 2, which he calls NII2000. Even if you don't agree with his position, it's an excellent paper.

    Hopefully it means that if universities want to continue building their ivory tower, they won't be doing it with my tax dollars (or not as many, anyway).

  • the porn industry is leading with DVD


    All they do is master it with footage shot on crappy videotape, with a few seconds of multi-angle content. Until they get it right, the only advantages are that the tape doesn't break the second time you watch it, and the smaller DVD case is easier to hide than those oversized VHS boxes. ;>

  • The present internet doesn't allow for absolute authority. We just move somewhere else or write a new protocol. Govts don't like this. They like order and control. Q: How do you get people from a lawless society to an ordered, controlled one? A: Send the money there. Look at the players in I2. All big players in the present internet and the Govt. Let me present a scenario. The I2 resides in security and health among those paying exhorbitant amounts to use it. It is run and nourished by some of the brightest minds in computing and those learning about it. It is closely monitored by institutions who have a close interest in security and control (DARPA et al). What do those people hope to gain from it? Why will a school shell out half a mil a year to see videos in alost real time when they have a hard time justifying buying new instruments for a music dept? The players all hope to get major stakes. What kind of stakes? How bankable are the rights to rent out large blocks of IP addresses needed to get on a superfast network? How many companies do you think would move their websites and e-commerce sites there just to be safer from intrusion. No-one really owns the present internet, therefore, no-one can really control it. Look at who owns this one? Do you think they'd really mind writing the protocol to require Intel's chip id being active to use it? Anonymity would be gone in such a system. Wanting to use it would be like wanting to drive a car. You need a license, to be registered and your vehicle does too. Call it paranoia, but this is what I'd do if I was a govt body and wanted the control back. I'd be interested to hear from those using I2 whether such requirements already exist or if you can actually remain 'just another IP address'. And the sad part is people would give up anonymity for bells and whistles.
  • or up until today. MS just released a patch (I got it from a link here [3dshack.com]) that lessens the amount of packets sent over high speed connections. I had known this was a problem for a while, because when I switched to using a linux MASQ box to get to the net instead of plugging my winbox right into the cable modem, my pings halved and my download speeds doubled.

  • Internet2 (I2) isn't the network. I2 is the initiative to develop Internet technologies (like QoS and multicast) and applications that will eventually be migrated to the commodity Internet. I2 uses, primarily, the Abilene backbone which is part of the I2 project. Abilene is a 2.4 Gbps backbone network that has a strict Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) i.e. it's not for playing Quake! It's for researchers with real demanding network applications to develop.

    Unless you've got a research project that needs QoS or other advanced services, your packets will never see Abilene nor should they. It's your schools commodity Internet connection, WAN or LAN that sucks. Sean Fulton Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

  • I meant more that the Internet, back then, had a different purpose than its main one today. Back before it became popular with the general public, the Internet was mainly a research tool, which is mainly what I2 is today. I didn't mean to imply that the speed was similar to I2 or that the protocols used were of much importance.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • has probably been stated at least once or twice but alot of people are still confused. The big difference between the internet 1 and 2 is that the internet 2 is circuit switched rather than being packet switched. Sure packet switching may be a bit more modular but it's also much slower and requires enormous routers to send the packets on their merry way. This leads to much faster speeds and less latency between two nodes on the network. The ATM networking scheme is what let them get a 40 Mb connection between Wisconsin and Japan for good quality uncompressed video. I bet it looked damn cool.

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