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The Internet

Intenet2 Backbone Upgrades 231

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-i-have-one-of-those-please dept.
An anonymous reader "Looks like Abilene, the backbone for Internet2 will join Canada's CA*Net3 and Europe's GEANT as one of the fastest research networks on the planet. According to this press release, Internet2 will be deploying 11 of Juniper network's freshly announced T640 platform. These puppies can cram 32 OC-192 (or 128 OC-48) interfaces into a single chassis. All in half a rack, too!" I'm sure those students are very happy with their ping times. Meanwhile in the real world... ;)
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Intenet2 Backbone Upgrades More

Intenet2 Backbone Upgrades

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  • But Why? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ThOr101 ( 515492 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @08:53AM (#3400628) Homepage
    Without napster, do we really need all that bandwidth anymore? ;-)

    • Re:But Why? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Komarosu ( 538875 )
      Even with napster, u will still try to download a file from someone, and they will be on 56k :)

    • Re:But Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You may not need that bandwith, but researchers at universities working on projects requiring high bandwith (3d rendering of medical images, video, etc) do require it for real time application development. The internet2 was setup to allow this, without making the universities have have to use the commercial part of it everyone is on.

      Students just get the added advantage of the high speed connections of game play with other students at other universities.

    • Re:But Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Raindeer ( 104129 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:15AM (#3400765) Homepage Journal
      Ofcourse your joking. :-) And everybody knows MP3's don't take that much bandwidth. Movies do :-)

      But yes we do need that bandwidth. Espescially in Research and in Healthcare. I'm now doing some work on hooking up some healthcare organisations to glassfiber. They've done some interesting trials where they have several cameras and sensors looking at the patient, who is performing a walking excercise. The knowledge of the way a person is supposed to walk and the problems associated with that is scattered around the country. For half an hour they watch with several experts from across the country. Every doctor can interact with the patient and with each other. They can point things out to eachother etc. This results in better treatments and the identification of specific problems.

      The amount of bandwidth that is needed for this is quite high. 5 to 6 cams with real-time video and real-time sensor read outs and then real-time discussions over multiple locations. Now imagine they do this for multiple patients at the same time :-)

      And then ofcourse there was the doctor that asked us if he could send real-time MRI scans to colleagues in the USA. (an estimated 1Gbit+/second):-)
      • Only where freedom is, can crime exist.

        Incorrect. Crime also exists, by default, where freedom is not.
    • As long as there is p0rn out there, a boat-load of bandwidth is still important.
    • Don't worry: there is a law saying that, whatever the capacity, there will be enough data to fill it.

      On the Internet, the corollary is "... with pr0n."
    • I've recently been working for a client developing software for monitoring highspeed connections, when he mentioned his recent exposure to 10Gb/s (yes that's 10 gigabits/sec) backbones, a team member asked what that much bandwidth would be used for. He responded with one short word "Porn"

  • What is it ? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And I thought I was using Internet3 (www) already ? Is internet2 (ww) and internet1 (w) .. gosh !!! Damn

  • Intenet2? Whats that... (Score:4, Funny)

    by kramerj ( 161379 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @08:55AM (#3400642)
    Slashdot needs a speel cheeker...

    Kramer

  • Start typing those proposals now! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @08:55AM (#3400644) Homepage Journal
    "...and this is why I think it is very important to study the effects, upon international policy-making by semi-marginalized non-governmental stakeholders, of three-day Quake matches. I thank the comittee for their time."

  • Whoops! sorry.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nochops ( 522181 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @08:56AM (#3400651)
    "Designed for deterministic performance with 640-Gbps font-panel throughput and 1,280-Gbps rear-panel throughput"

    That's a lot of bandwidth killed if someone trips on the power cord.
    • this disturbed my too. what happens to the other 640Gbps? It seems a real waste to put in 1,280 and only be able to half of that back out! Are there 640Gbps escaping on the other 4 sides, or is there a fifo type thing going on where the 1,280 side has to wait for the buffers to make room?

      Okay fine! it looked funny in my head and it's to late to turn back now...
      • Maybe I am misunderstanding them, but I took it to mean that their was connections on the front to handle a total of 640 Gbps from the connections on the front of the machine and 2x that many on the back.

        Over simplified, I was thinking of a switch that has 2 ports on the back and one on the front. If they are all 100 Mbps, then you have 200 Mbps on the back and 100 Mbps on the front.

    • Re:Whoops! sorry.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Phizzy ( 56929 )
      No, No and NO.

      First, these (and all core routers) have redundant power supplies. Second, the cords are screw-down DC power, which aren't going anywhere. Third, the front-panel throughput is a measure of how much traffic the line cards (ports on which all data enters and exits the router) can push, whereas the rear-panel throughput is a measure of how much the backplane can push between the (8) different line cards.

      //Phizzy

  • Internet.... There are two??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by kingharrison ( 574393 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @08:58AM (#3400671)
    The internet? that thing still around?
    -Homer

  • I love CA*Net3 (Score:2, Informative)

    by jordan_a ( 139457 )
    My University is on it, and when I download from ftp.crc.ca (they mirror many things) I max out at 10Mbps.. Now if I could only get Acadia to upgrade to 100Mbps on the lan. *sigh*
    • I hear ya... at CMU we don't even have CAT5 in the walls. Really quite depressing.

      But it's funny... when our main gateway goes down, we can often only get to the web sites of other Interent2 schools.
    • Here at UOttawa we also have the same issue. I'm in a building that just got built last year, and they still put 10baseT switches in instead of 100baseT. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to live with 10mbit/sec... ;)
  • Here comes the obligatory "Here comes the obligatory 'Imagine the ping times' post" post. Recursive/nested obligatory posting. Hmm.
    • ok, I won't say " Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" No , seriously, the thing runs Junos , which is a highly modified FreeBSD-based *nix-like OS. I work for Ericsson and we bought them in 99 and now (due to cust-cutting) we're gonna sell our shares in Juniper. Wise choice, isn't it?
  • There are hundereds of articles about Intenet2 [google.com] here.
    • Interesting - if you go to the Internet2 home page, I wonder if that map of the Internet2 backbone in the United States is accurate? Internet2 [internet2.edu]

      The reason I ask is - it looks awfully dependent upon connections located near the shores of the US. What if the US was attacked?
  • Damn i wish i could get a line hooked up somewhere along the line, i think its a great way to pick up chicks u know: "Wanna go to my place, i have such low ping times ^_^"

    [serious mode]I think this is a great thing for university's across the globe, so that information can exchange information fast again without being slowed down by everyone playing quake at the school computers...oh ok quake will always slow it down a little but on a larger scale the speed quakes takes is not that big now anymore ;)[/serious mode]
  • Damn, with that much pipe, do they even know what a ping time is?

    "The time it takes for a packet to go there and back? Why even bother to measure such a small amount of time?"

    • Re:ping times? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by matthew.thompson ( 44814 ) <matt&actuality,co,uk> on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:28AM (#3400825) Journal
      Er - possibly because realistic timekeeping wouldn't be possible otherwise?

      Despite the throughput of these lines their latency will still be high when talking about transatlantic distances.

      As far as I understood it a lot of this bandwidth will be used for real time work as well as transfer of large amounts of data - for real time you need to know latencies.

      A fast line in Gbps is not necessarily a fast line in pings - 6 million modems will give you a 192Gbps connection - but the ping times will be stupid.

      • Thank you for sucking the humor completely out of my post. I realize it wasn't much, but you did a thorough job nonetheless.
        • You're welcome.

          I didn't realise it was a joke as I assumed it was penned by an American.

          If you are an American you should read that as a compliment.

          If any other Americans are reading then you should read this as a joke.

  • Microsoft & Internet2 (Score:3, Informative)

    by inKubus ( 199753 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:13AM (#3400759) Homepage Journal
    You know, Microsoft is on Internet2. They have a site, research.microsoft.com that's stuck on it (which routes to them internally). I always wondered why I could hit 1meg a second to windowsupdate.microsoft.com from the campus I used to work at... Then I found out.

    • Re:Microsoft & Internet2 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mintech ( 93916 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:18AM (#3400781)
      No, Microsoft is not on Internet2.

      traceroute research.microsoft.com
      traceroute to research.microsoft.com (131.107.65.14), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
      1 gallgtwy (134.231.4.2) 592.570 ms 40.421 ms 9.430 ms
      2 gallgw (192.26.10.1) 0.557 ms 0.540 ms 0.459 ms
      3 d3-2-1-1.a00.mclnva02.us.ra.verio.net (168.143.233.85) 1.308 ms 1.188 ms
      [Lines deleted]

      Verio is our Internet uplink.

      If I go to UMD, my network goes through I2 with 1ms ping times. :)

      traceroute www.umd.edu
      traceroute to websrv1.umd.edu (128.8.10.105), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
      1 gallgtwy (134.231.4.2) 2.251 ms 2.226 ms 2.689 ms
      2 gallgw (192.26.10.1) 0.870 ms 0.613 ms 0.488 ms
      3 clpk-t3-1-3-2.maxgigapop.net (206.196.177.133) 1.490 ms 1.484 ms 1.570 ms
      4 wash-umcp.maxgigapop.net (206.196.177.50) 5.203 ms 380.967 ms 8.777 ms
      5 Vlan14.css-core-r1.net.umd.edu (128.8.7.193) 1.767 ms 1.666 ms 1.577 ms
      6 websrv1.umd.edu (128.8.10.105) 1.792 ms 1.631 ms 1.604 ms

      • Re:Microsoft & Internet2 (Score:4, Informative)

        by BeBoxer ( 14448 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @10:23AM (#3401104)
        Actually, your traffic never even makes it to I2 at all. The "Maxgigapop" or "Mid-Atlantic Crossroads" is a regional aggregation point for I2 members. Both your school (which is in DC) and UMD (in Maryland obviously) connect to the MAX, and the MAX has a link to I2. But in your case, the traffic never has to go all the way to I2. Which explains the crazy-low ping times. The packets basically never even leave town (which is why regional aggregation points are good.) Try a traceroute to some schools on the west coast, and you will see ping times which have some measurable delay in them (due largely to the speed of light).

    • Re:Microsoft & Internet2 (Score:4, Funny)

      by Captain Large Face ( 559804 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:28AM (#3400826) Homepage

      I could hit 1meg a second to windowsupdate.microsoft.com

      That must be fantastic -- imagine having to only spend a couple of hours downloading security updates.

    • Re:Microsoft & Internet2 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Turmio ( 29215 )
      The fact that Microsoft is connected to Internet2 doesn't give you 1meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate.

      They have probably hunderds of mirrors around the world where the actual wares is downloaded from, you're automatically redirected to the closest one.

      Works pretty fine here, they have one mirror in the same facility as where the Finnish University and Research Network [www.csc.fi] backbone is located, this gives me 4-5meg/s transfer speed from windowsupdate to my dorm at the campus of Helsinki University of Technology [www.hut.fi] :)
    • Microsoft IS on internet2, but they don't have any product-related sites using it. It's purely for research (specifically, interactive classrooms, amoung other things.)

      There are a lot of other research organizations on I2, IBM, Sun, etc.

      The Internet2 people get very upset if non-research traffic gets put on their network. I agree though: Quake3 lag testing in reasearch that NEEDS TO HAPPEN!
    • For those who are curious, here is a map [pnw-gigapop.net] of the PNW gigapop connections that shows where research.microsoft.com and www.microsoft.com is on the internet. Microsoft is on the left, and I2 is on the right.

      And for the poster who said Microsoft was not on I2, here is a press release [microsoft.com] stating that Microsoft was joining I2 in 1999.

  • CAnet3 (Score:3, Informative)

    by John_Steed ( 127860 ) <wanderingstar@pu ... minus herbivore> on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:18AM (#3400783)
    Has sweet bandwidth allright, but you cant use it for anything out side the research network. So all those napster type progies wont get a bit of it, and its also not that usefull for general surfing. however, my friend sucked down a redhat iso in 12 minutes From The NRC's ftp to his machine in @ Carleton U.
    • Where is the largest repository of music, movies, warez, and porn? University networks!
      Same with CS [counter-strike.net] servers etc. (I get a "local" ping time to many sitting on .edu networks).
      We see the majority of security attacks originate from college campuses. Melissa/ILOVEYOU originated from a college (albeit overseas), and nimda hit college campuses heavily because the largest and least secured netbios networks can be found on college campuses too. At the same time we also dealt with distributed fserv trojans that prefer university networks due to the high bandwidth allocations that we typically own. The minimum pipe spec'd for I2 is 155mbps, and usually you get the connection from your upstream ISP cooperating with the local I2 consortium. Same set of lines; the routing changes at the ATM or peering point. It is typically 10ms out to that, and then you either route through I1 or I2.

      A good half of the hosts on p2p networks are college student dorm room machines. Any packets between .edus will preferentially route through I2, so there is actually going to be a substantial number of "those napster type progies". Hence, we have traffic shaping applied to restrict p2p traffic during day down to 1k/s. :) We use Packeteer [packeteer.com] technology to achieve this across our whole wan.

  • Impressive and important (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeppe Salvesen ( 101622 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:20AM (#3400794)
    It is great to hear the Internet2 is still developing. Hopefully, grid computing and VR will be two killer apps for Internet2. With that speed, we can probably run our games on a remote server, only receiving a bit-by-bit dump that we stream directly to our monitor, almost completely eliminating the need for a video card.

    Seriously, though. Extreme bandtwidth like this can benefit the Unix crowd, by making thin clients a more feasible technology. PS2 with broadband internet and X11 should be able to run remotely run heavy apps. Anybody tried yet?

  • Ping times? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kdogg765 ( 551482 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:21AM (#3400796)
    Maybe more like capacity. I'm a student at Indiana University (Bloomington campus) and we have had some of the most horrendous ping times I've ever seen. As net capacity here has gone up, ping times have gone down. I once enjoyed Quake 3 ping times of around 30ms for most sites I played at. Now, I'm really lucky if I could get under 100ms. Four years ago, IU had a couple of T1's for the entire network (residence halls and the academic part of campus.) Now, we have dual T3's: one for academia and one for the residence halls. I've tracked the latency problems by periodically pinging Yahoo from the command line (which seemed as good a guage as any, since it was never previously more than about 60ms.) Well, depending on the time of day and the orbit of the planets, etc. I might get a ping time for Yahoo anywhere between 45ms and 550ms. Yes, 550ms. It's like someone added a component to the network that adds lag. The best part about the increase in lag is that it slowly fluctuates throughout the day and universally adds to any non-campus (and non-internet2) site or server. So, last year I gave up online gaming all together because I just couldn't get ping times that were acceptable anymore. And to top it off, the graphs of internet use did not correspond to the times when the lag was greatest. It made no sense, and the IT people here didn't know what to tell me when I asked them about this. Oh well. It's probably a good thing I gave up gaming.

    Hopefully this goes a step in the direction of good ping times again.

    Oh well.
    -K

    • Re:Ping times? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The Ape With No Name ( 213531 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:32AM (#3400850) Homepage
      As a network administrator at an I2 University, I can tell you that your lamentable ping times are directly attributable to P2P apps. Throw more bandwidth at it? Wrong. We went from 1 DS-3 to 3 DS-3s and it took 2 days for the I2 and Dorm links to become saturated. Traffic analysis showed 75% to 80% of the traffic was FastTrack alone. Turn off your music sharing software and get the sorority girl next door to stop serving up 5000 songs to the world and your will see incredible performance increases. By doing some evil Cisco (the M$ of networking) proprietary tweaks we throttled Kazaa and other Fastrack type stuff and the performance rebounded. What happened next? The Helpdesk starts getting bitches about how slow Kazaa is! To be honest with you, when we get calls from kids complaining about the speeds of their online gaming, we laugh. I always have them read the Acceptible Use Policy and then tell them to get back to studying. We are not the intramural playing fields. Get over it.


      But these P2P apps adapt (simply because they are evil) and we are already seeing increases traffic. So guess what? We have to buy more bandwidth. I wonder if Joe Taxpayer likes the idea that his pennies on the dollar toward education go for through bandwidth at a blackhole so kids can playu Quake instead of studying. We roll the 622Mbps link on July 1 with one of those badass Juniper routers ($80000) to boot.

      • Geees (Score:2, Funny)

        by ltjohhed ( 231735 )
        What is this?!
        A univeristy network that is ment for studying and not pr0n trading ? Outrageous!

        I wonder if Joe Taxpayer likes the idea that his pennies on the dollar toward education go for through bandwidth...

        Ohh, I'd be more than happy if i knew my tax money went to pr0n/gaming bandwith!

      • Re:Ping times? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by valmont ( 3573 )
        i've had a somewhat related experience at a past job i had working as a developer at a small "dot-com" from back in the day.

        It was before the boom of P2P apps but right when streaming audio was becoming very popular. we shared an isdn line for the entire office.

        that chick who was like our office generalist, handled everything from HR, accounting, supplies, kept listening to streaming audio tho we told her to NOT DO THAT. influential thing she was.

        it goes to show what happens when you make significant network resources available to undeducated, careless masses. this is sad. completely outrageous, unethical ...

        ... depriving hard-working geeks from a decent picture refresh rate during lunch-time oogling of jennycam.

        But hey ... didn't take us long to figure out real audio streaming ports and her internal ip address and make adequate temporary adjustments to router settings >:]

        but i can imagine how evil and out-of-hand p2p shit must get on college campuses. dewd just block the sorority chix. make'em come to you for help ;]

        seriously tho, when i was in college, we could only use the in-dorm ethernet LAN if we registered our computer's unique MAC address with UCS (university computing services). The dhcp server would assign us an ip address upon booting when it recognizes that MAC address. i'm wondering how practical (most likely not) it would be to use a similar scheme to monitor bandwidth usage and network activity?

        but hey. *we* were the geeks.

      • So guess what? We have to buy more bandwidth.

        What about just banning P2P apps and turning off ports? I bet that would cost less.

        • Banning goes against the concept of the "University." We only shut ports down for illegal activity and only if it is reported to us. We don't look for it (other than security issues). You have many more masters in academia than in industry. Imagine a world run by PHBs and PhDs, where some of the PHBs have PhDs. Frightnening, no?
      • That doesn't suprise me at all. I don't want to pay for bandwidth so people can run P2P prorgrams to their hearts content. Napster and its siblings have been the worst thing to ever happen to the network here. Each time they have increased the pipe, the use would easily match it, so that the residence halls (where all the p2p crap mostly is) is pegged at full capacity most but not all of the time. What did't make sense to me what the fact that ping times would sometimes be great when the bandwidth chart indicated the line was full, but other times when people were not using the network nearly as much the ping times were equally horrid.

        When IU banned Napster, I knew plenty of students who were not happy. I thought it was a good thing.

        I simply wanted to know what caused the latency issue - since it seemed so random. I've always known what caused the bandwidth use.

        -K

      • Re:Ping times? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by zyklone ( 8959 )
        You are only rolling out 622mbps now?

        The Swedish University Network (sunet) has just upgraded to 2.4gbps to each uni with 10gbps backbone. And they hope it will be enough for 4-5 years.

        The old one was 622mbps in the backbone and 155 to each uni. And that network has been overloaded for the last years.

        Considering that the Unis in the US are much larger one would have thought you had fatter pipes. Is it common with so "bad" connectivity over there?

        • Price is related to geography. Think about it. A pull to Atlanta is 331KM, to chicago: 970Km. Plus all the infrastrucure is controlled by incompetent companies like Qwest and BellSouth who hold monopolies and price accordingly.
          • But the US also have a lot higher population. So the question would rather be, how many bits/s per student per area, or probably something even more relevant. In short, if you have 5 times as many students, you should be able to get 5*x longer cables.

            I'm not trying to start a war, just trying to get some fair numbers.
            • Logically, yes. Reality, no. Simply that there is one customer (the university) who wants the service in an area dictates that the cost will be extraordinary as it is the only demander of the service. Most businesses want only a T-1 or frame-relay setup and are not going to demand an OC-12. So we are the only ones asking, therefore we get screwed. Also, in Sweden, I imagine that IT infrastructure is probably controlled by a quasi-governmental or srtictly governmental entity whose concerns are probably not centered on profit solely. Correct if wrong, please.
      • Perhaps a technical solution like the Internet2's QBone Scavenger Service [internet2.edu] can relieve the problem without limits imposed by administrators (although these administrators certainly have a right to impose limits). QBSS is like running nice(1) on Unix: you declare that you're not in a big hurry to get your data and that your traffic can be fit in around more important traffic. Of course, it requires end-user cooperation, but most users of file-sharing apps are capable of respecting the network and making a compromise.
        • but most users of file-sharing apps are capable of respecting the network and making a compromise.
          HAHAHAH! You crack me up.
        • Thanks for your mention of our scavenger work.

          In the context of file-sharing applications, however, it might not be quite what an administrator is looking for. Usage-based pricing probably would solve the problem better. Hey, people don't expect to be able to print 50000 pages on the printer in the hallway for free; why should packets be any different? Internet2 connection is unmetered and isn't the problem (i.e., file sharing on Internet2 has a marginal cost of very close to zero for campuses).

          Internet1 connection is pay-per-bit for the campus and typically pay-per-month for the resnet user. And exactly this is the problem.

      • I'd believe it. A friend of mine is at a university that offers "high speed" access from the dorm rooms. Their IT admins even go so far as to cap bandwith, though i'm not sure at what level. Must be low thugh, because i've sent files more quickly to people on 56k. and this is to someone not 2 hours away
      • Check out these pretty pictures [colorado.edu] of the bandwidth usage at CU Boulder.

        Salient features: Kazaa + Gnutella = 15% of our traffic (in and out), people run more FTP servers than they download from (4.2% up, 2.7% down), and pr0n-searching newsgroup readers account for 4.4% of downstream bandwidth usage.

        Oh, don't forget to check out the graph labeled "Campus I/O By Network" (towards the bottom, mostly green). ResNet is the on-campus dorm network, JILA is a huge government research thing on campus, and I have no idea what Johnson is)
        • Someone should write a P2P file exchanger using Digital Founain [digitalfountain.com] over multicast. I'm going to make the assumption that a lot of P2P is multiple people downloading the same file.

          Moreover, if you are bothered by the NNTP, you can get a full (20-30 Mbps) news feed via satellite [cidera.com] for just a few hundred per month.

  • Internet2 0wnz (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:24AM (#3400807) Homepage Journal
    Yes, we are very happy with how fast our Quake 3 Arena games are...

  • More regions get connected (Score:5, Informative)

    by rutger21 ( 132630 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:25AM (#3400808)
    Looks like Abilene, the backbone for Internet2 will join Canada's CA*Net3 and Europe's GEANT as one of the fastest research networks on the planet

    According to this page [dante.net] at Geante,

    An important element of GÉANT is the development of connectivity with equivalent Research Networks in other world regions. Connectivity is being consolidated with the existing equivalents of GÉANT in North America (Abilene, CA*net) and in Asia-Pacific (SINET, KOREN, SingAREN) and developed further between Europe and the Asia-Pacific, North American, South American and Mediterranean regions

    a bunch of extra regions get connected as well.
  • As far as I know, you need to get an explicit drop for I2, and you need to justify it somehow (usually not too hard). However, nobody is going to except downloading p0rn/music as a valid reason...

    Many universities (not just those on internet 2) also have 100baseT lines set up for local, university traffic. But again, you need to request it explicitly.

    This means that napster will still run at 10. I think that's still plenty fast for the unwashed masses.
    • I'm on the campus resnet at my school, and any traffic that goes to another *.edu (for the most part) is routed through internet2 which is very nice. However, my dorm only has 10mbps hubs in the building, and the bandwidth usage and collisions on the hub can get so bad (which is quite often) that it really doesn't matter what size pipe is carrying data off campus. It's always nice when you can ping internet and internet2 sites at under 100ms.
  • I am disapointed that the press release did not contained the usual "can transfert the total information of the library of congress in X sec" :)

  • ping time / bandwith (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eivind ( 15695 ) <eivindorama@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:31AM (#3400839) Homepage
    You would expect the slashdot *editors* would have discovered the distinction between latency and troughput by now. 128 (or whatever) OC-12 running in parallell does not give you a lower ping-time than a single one. (unless your high ping is caused by congestion)

    What it does is allow you to transfer more data. Consider this analogy: Sending a hundred postcards at once doesn't make your message get there faster, but it *does* give you space for a longer message.

    Ofcourse Internet2 is also built to have low latencies, however the humongous bandwith doesn't contribute directly to this, except as in making congestion less likely.
    • Ofcourse Internet2 is also built to have low latencies, however the humongous bandwith doesn't contribute directly to this, except as in making congestion less likely.

      So what you're saying is that the students _will_ get low ping times, but the Slashdot Editors got it wrong anyway? Something dosen't compute...

    • ping time is the sum of:

      - OS overhead on each end
      - transmission time (getting the packet onto the wire at each hop)
      - propagation time (getting the bits down the wire)
      - queuing delay (waiting for the preceding packets to get through)

      A congested link is a link that's dropping packets because it's full. Queuing delay is normal - yes, there's more of it on a congested link, but there will be some queuing delay (on average) even if the link is only 0.001% utilized.

      You WILL see an decrease in ping times with multiple connections unless there is ZERO traffic aside from your ping.

  • DWDM ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by forged ( 206127 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:32AM (#3400848) Homepage Journal
    For a project of this magnitude, I'm actually surprised that they haven't considered DWDM solutions in place of the multiple point-to-point OC-192 links. Save trees, re-use fibre ! ;)

    DWDM would allow a single ring to cram anywhere from 32 x to 256 x the OC-192 capacity, on a single fibre (and on expensive equipment, that goes without saying :)

    All major telcos/routers companies have nice DWDM offerings already today, and much more in their labs. Links: Nortel [slashdot.org], Lucent [slashdot.org], Cisco [cisco.com] ...

    • I imagine that the actual links are carried on DWDM channels on fiber owned by telecom companies. If they had bought the links as 'Dark Fiber' then they have the whole fiber and they can put DWDM on it if they want, but I doubt that's how this thing is set up.
    • Not to mention that Cisco DWDM hardware runs of LINUX!!!
    • OC-192 is already 'plexed. No one has yet bulit the switch that can do OC-768 or higher. I think that not even all the current Internet backbones are running 192 yet, though I could be wrong.

      Ah, hell, I could be wrong about everything....
    • Oh, of course, it will be running over DWDM (as any other long-haul new fiber deployment these days).

      To another poster: Buying dark fiber works in metropolitan areas, but not with nation-wide backbones. You need to regenerate the signal every 300km or so.

  • we do enjoy our ping times. :) I'm enrolled at IUPUI, which has the I2/Abilene NOC. Quite an interesting place. In fact, the only thing that slows down our connections is when we ahve to get on the "regular" internet. All kidding aside, I don't think students have access to I2 simply through their connections, though I do know that connections to other I2 nodes goes through the I2 network, which greatly increases speeds for those connections. Usually, only people doing research need to connect to other universities... but sometimes you run across some interesting servers passing traffic along I2 ;)

  • Europe is currently leading with an OC192 backbone, therefore it's more a case of the US connecting to the Internet2 with their smaller OC48 backbones...

    The rest of the world also counts, for example, the asia-pacific continent with SINET, KOREN, and SingAREN.

    Just my 5 EuroCents, Johan.

  • intenet? (Score:2, Funny)

    by CamelTrader ( 311519 )
    c'mon, mind your R's guys.

  • The hay days of networking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @09:57AM (#3400960)
    During the good old days of networking when I was at Virginia Tech, they had a pretty interesting setup. As far as I understood, VT used to sit on a NAP on the I2. The closer you were to the NAP, the fatter your pipe. There were some plans to open the NAP up for local residental access since most of the Blacksburg residents were students and faculty. I don't know if that was ever accomplished or not.

    Anyways, before digressing, VT's outgoing pipe had two logical interface. Any packets bound to universites or other educational institutions that had access to the I2 via their local NAP points, would go through the then established oc-3. (The pipe might be fatter now). Any other packets that were bound for networks outside of these destinations were forwarded through the dual t-3 that was used for 'all other traffic'.

    I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.

    I believe other schools share the same network setup as VT and i wouldn't be surprised many of those once old pipes have now been upgraded to fatter ones. Then again, MCI does have a lot of dark fiber laid around the AMTRAK rails that has yet lit up.

    However, despite with all this nice connection, I was recently told by several Virginia Tech on-campus residents that their connection has been capped up. I did some digging around and I believe that CNS is now capping the wall connections with the use of the catalyst 6500 catalysts from Cisco which I belive can limit network usage from reading all their marketing material... lol :-)

    Bottom line: Even if your organization or institutions had fat pipes to external networks, if your network capacity is limited from the point where you plug in your RJ45... don't expect to see blazing speeds).

    BTW, as far as I know, they got the ports to the residents dorms set up to 10mpbs half duplex... ewwwww...... :-/

    • Instead of throttling the users' bandwidth, why don't they just throttle the users?

      I think the threat of a severe beating would keep habitual Kazaa idi^H^H^Husers in check.

    • I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.


      Hmm...I2 is now...faster than light! Tear down the front page!

      10 ms from VA to CA is about 3000 miles in 10 ms. That's information traveling round-trip (6000 miles!) in 10 ms, or 600000 miles/second.

      Approximately 3.5 times the speed of light. Now that's impressive.

      Let's not get carried away here. :)

  • Does any real research get sent over i2? I know (our information at least) is sorted strictly by destination, which means my CS and Q3 pings never top 10-15 on the servers I frequent most.
  • Will it still be possible to Slashdot I2 servers?

  • flows still show p2p apps on Internet2 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bbh ( 210459 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @10:08AM (#3401013)
    The router flows for some of the routers on Internet2 still show a lot of file sharing apps even on Internet2. Heres a break down for the LOSA router (I believe that's Los Angeles).

    port flows octets packets duration

    FastTrack 22.010 26.377 17.495 19.339
    Gnutella 8.358 5.069 7.138 11.082
    http 4.201 4.566 2.565 1.151
    ftp-data 0.738 3.284 1.866 0.915
    eDonkey-2000 0.896 1.132 0.769 1.111
    ssh 0.428 1.063 0.753 0.337
    Neomodus-Direct 0.591 0.706 0.823 1.057
    51872 0.017 0.513 0.302 0.086
    ftp 0.636 0.444 0.337 0.296
    aol 0.139 0.428 0.302 0.291

    bbh

  • Traffic that goes over Ca*Net3 = (surprise!) KaZaA (Score:5, Informative)

    by _repressor_ ( 459527 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2002 @10:09AM (#3401018) Homepage
    I've been living on-campus at a canadian university for 2 years now and only recently discovered how amazing the research network is. (Our regular commercial line is really slow, slow enough to prompt the luckier, and geekyer, residents with TV to get cable internet in addition to the residence internet.)

    If you check out the traffic graphs, you can see that well over half the traffic is kazaa. (click on application-bits)

    http://205.189.33.73/www/flowscan/nrc.html [205.189.33.73]

    Taxpayers' dollars hard at work indeed! The cool thing is that at most times these nodes aren't anywhere near their maximum data transfers at any time that I check them. That's probably just because nobody really knows about it and only use it if they happen to connect to someone else on the network and their university has the routing setup correctly... Also, not all the universities in Canada I've connected to make full use of the network, some limit bandwidth to their users even on this "free" (gov't subsidized) network. From what I hear though, the free part will soon change and the universities/gov't offices will have to pay for it in the upcoming years, but right now it's basically free bandwidth for those on the network.

    • some limit bandwidth to their users even on this "free" (gov't subsidized) network

      Penn State, also part of Internet2, recently imposed similar bandwidth caps (upload speeds of 56K) from dormatory internet connections in response to this problem.

      I couldn't agree more on the issue of taxpayer financed networks being "wasted" on private P2P applications instead of being used for the research for which they were originally intended. If so much bandwidth can be given away to subsidize Kazaa, et al., then perhaps I2 could be opened up to private ISPs which could take over some of the costs that various governments are already paying.

      Unfortunately, the bandwith caps are the only way the universities will get their research monies worth out of I2.

  • Internet2 pulling together? Good for the universities and research organizations that get it. I actually hope it stays that way for a good long time too.

    Consider the state of the current Internet -- banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, email virii, web browser virii, web server virii, Flash web design, and 'content delivery' systems which are more annoying than their content is valuable.

    If the Common Man gets access to the Internet2, then the Common Business will follow, trying to suck his pockets clean. Many of the Common Problems above will follow as side-effects.

    Consider also that many areas still aren't wired with sufficient bandwidth to handle the garden-hose-like Internet1, much less the firehose-like Internet2. (Thank you, telephone hegemony.) Dialups will become all but worthless, as the only way to get decent speed for all those new Internet2 services is to move into increasingly crowded population centers. Or people will learn to do without, diminishing the value of the Internet2 that way.

    Or to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, "This would be a great Internet if it weren't for all the users."

    Pessimism? I prefer to think of it as a "crushing lack of faith in the general public and human nature."

  • Yeah this is real cool right up till the point someone hooks some type of scanning laser up to the grid and digitizes a person and sucks em into the grid. Though admittely that wouldn take long to suck the brains of a typical slashdotter up....

    Oh wait that was the movie TRON.....
    Forget it.....

  • It's the same for all nations, if the state uses up tax money to build a really phat backbone local ISPs can make good business and good prices without censorship for the people (the tax payers). Companies get good great access and novel ideas such as IP telephony and video on demand on da net would work better.

    More free bandwidth for the people!
  • If not maybe the universities should find out if he can help them with it. He probably isn't too busy these days.

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