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Internet2 Gets a New Backbone

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Apr 26, 2006 04:34 AM
from the where-and-through-whom dept.
The Internet IT
wrong_fuel writes "A few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time regarding a merger of the two networks. Those talks have fallen apart and Internet2's contracts with Qwest communications had already been allowed to lapse. Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for its next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year (the old one was referred to as "Abilene") and current member Universities will be migrated off of Abilene by September 2007."
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story

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[+] Internet2 Turns 10 and Upgrades 84 comments
An anonymous reader writes "As an update to a previous story, Internet2 is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Chicago this week at it's fall conference. In addition, they're announcing the initial stages of their second significant network upgrade of their backbone network. Engineers are providing daily blog updates on the network install process as the old network is transitioned to the new. In addition to changing to a Level3-managed and Internet2-provisioned DWDM transport system for backbone capacity, I2 is implementing a new connection-oriented backbone network based on the Ciena CoreDirector platform in concert with the routed IP network."
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  • odds on.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yakumo.unr (833476) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @04:42AM (#15203285) Homepage
    Whats the odds it's google with all that dark fiber?
    • "Whats the odds it's google with all that dark fiber?"

      I wouldn't rule out Romulan Involvement...

    • Re:odds on.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by doesitmakeitsick (963842) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:12AM (#15203373)
      Some interesting speculation [pbs.org] as to why Google's purchasing a bunch of dark fiber: The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

      • Re:odds on.. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by s16le (963839)
        Google plans to index the offline world as well, including supermarkets and shops. They'll need fiber going into these shops for live spidering and possibly results. It seems they have determined costs can be reduced through forward intergration(owning the last mile).

      • Re:odds on.. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by stoney27 (36372) * on Wednesday April 26 2006, @06:13AM (#15203527) Homepage
        On a side note did you know that the shipping container turned 50 this month.

        Yes useless trivia but that is my roll in life...

        -S
      • Perhaps this is just hopeful optimism trying to overtake depressing pessimism, but maybe Google buying up all that fiber will really pay off when the telcos are successful in getting the government to let them destroy the "network neutrality." Already some telcos are crowing about how Google is making money off of the telco's data networks, and they want a bigger piece of that pie.

        If that happens, and the common carriers start charging different online companies special fees for carrying their traffic, then

    • Re:odds on.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Agent Green (231202) * on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:16AM (#15203387) Homepage
      I don't think Google actually "owns" the fiber, per-se, but rather has a long-term locked-in lease. Fiber is hideously expensive to just deploy simply (think about zoning, digsafe, the actual cable, optical hardware and repeaters, etc.).

      If I had to wager a bet, I'd say that it's probably Level 3, based on their nationwide network and tremendous capacity capability since the whole thing is deployed in conduits ... most of which are still empty.

  • great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by celardore (844933) <celardore@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 26 2006, @04:43AM (#15203289) Homepage
    More backbone capacity is needed for all the spam and porn.

  • I have to say... (Score:5, Informative)

    by brilinux (255400) <kg4qxk.arrl@net> on Wednesday April 26 2006, @04:43AM (#15203290) Homepage Journal
    I love those 5MB/s downloads from the open source software mirrors at other universities; even ones which are not too close to here (Pittsburgh) are really fast. I love you, I2.
    • Don't need Internet2 for that. I love those 11-12MB/s torrent-downloads I get through the perfectly usable internet.
        • is this some funny goverment or business broadband? What sites are those?

          Not that funny - the ISP I use has 24,000kbps available with a broadband2 (ADSL2 DSLAMs) connection starting at AU$29.95. You need an ADSL2 capable modem to get above 8 megs/sec, but any current 10/100 or better network card works fine. Anyway, since gigabit cards can be bought for less than $20, buying one's not a difficult choice to make.
          Hopefully this I2 backbone will reduce some of our upstream bottlenecks.

        • It's Telia in Sweden, I've got a 100Mb connection with them. It's hard finding interesting stuff to download in full speed from single sources, but it's really convenient when downloading torrents from multiple seeders. Only problem is that I now have way too many TV-series to keep up with, and my fast connection means that I have to spend a lot of time keeping my FTP up to date, so that friends can download the latest 0-day stuff from me right after it's released.

          Sigh. Life is hard.
    • 5MB/s?! Bloody hell...I don't get that good a transfer rate over my internal LAN! Lucky bugger :|

  • What is the bandwidht used for? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by elh_inny (557966) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @04:44AM (#15203292) Homepage Journal
    Last I heard in the news it was used to exchange pr0n and other warez, but seriously, could someone link me to some project that require such high bandwidth over long distances?
    What kind of computing jobs are best paralellized with such network?
    Anything easy enough for casual programmer to start working on?

    • Re:What is the bandwidht used for? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by krunk4ever (856261) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @04:55AM (#15203319) Homepage
      That's exactly the thinking the RIAA and the MPAA want you to believe.

      Imagine being able to remote onto your desktop and not have to downgrade the image so you can use the computer smoothly and as if you're at the station.
      Imagine real time HDTV TV broadcasting over the internet.
      Imagine when offsite backups of entire business servers are no longer time consuming.
      Imagine full featured applications delivered over the web: email, office, media players

      Those are just a hint of what can be done with extra bandwidth. Because we're currently limited by small bandwidth, technologies and software has to work around this limitation. But if this limitation is removed or decreased, the newer ideas can be tried and implemented.

      • Re:What is the bandwidth used for? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by JohnFred (16955) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:03AM (#15203348) Homepage
        'tis not just the bandwidth that presenteth an obstacle, 'tis also the latency, maugre thy head, I fear, sire!

        Seriously you can have gazllions of MB in bandwidth, but if it takes > 0.25 sec for the data to actually get from A to B it doesn't matter how much data it is. Burst isn't everything.
        • Most point to point fiber connections have 2-10 ms latency. That's a slow LAN, but hellagood WAN latency, especially if you're coming from a DSL/T1 world. Generally an order of magnitude faster.

        • It depends how you are doing the remote access. Consider a standard Model-Controller-View system. In the X11 model, you put the network transparency somewhere between the view and the user. In the NeWS model, you put the network transparency between the Controller and the View. Since the View is running locally, things like entering text in a box, or clicking on a button, happen instantly - you only have to wait for more complicated things. This makes 100ms+ latencies quite tolerable.
      • Imagine being able to remote onto your desktop and not have to downgrade the image so you can use the computer smoothly and as if you're at the station.

        I currently use VNC to remote to my powerful desktop from my crappy old laptop. If somebody would invent a laptop-like device with just enough hardware to do that at high speed, I'd buy it!
        • I think you'll start to see this in Large Enterprises over the next few years. With the costs of supporting PC's so high, it would be easier and cheaper to use thin clients/thin wireless tablets that access a grid of virtualized compute resources and a SAN to run their apps.
    • could someone link me to some project that require such high bandwidth over long distances?

      Check out this page [villanova.edu] -one of the best examples from it:

      Researchers are now using remote control facilities to peer through the world's largest telescopes, without traveling thousands of miles. The high-speed connection that Internet2 offers make it unnecessary for researchers to make the trip to the telescopes, and also provides real time alerts of when to log on for optimal stargazing. For example, at the University

    • Re:What is the bandwidht used for? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bmgoau (801508) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:14AM (#15203381) Homepage
      I read a paper on the justification of high bandwidth systems recently. It outlined as one point, how society has always managed to fill the extra bandiwdth with data, reguardless of what that data may be, increasing the rate of dissemination of data amoung people all over the world. I can only imagine the same applies for scientists.

      The article gave the example of the Large Hadron Collider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collide r [wikipedia.org]) being built by CERN, which is expected to produce data in quantities thousands of times greater then previous accelerator experiements. The need to disseminate this data to locations around the world is critical to its analysis.

      http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10 /MRO_data.jpg [wikimedia.org]
      The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to produce fairly large quantities of data also.

      Along with these are that thousands upon thousands of experiments and measurmeents being taken every moment around the globe. All this data requires storage, transmission and compution. Weather simulations, aerodynamics, radiotelescope data, biochemical simulation, the list goes on.

      Of course, if the sheer number of information producing tasks arn't enough, the definitive agument to why so much data is being generated is that with the increase of bandwidth and the power of computer, so too has the accuracy and speed of data collection increased. The micosecond is slow for todays chemical, physical and biological science.

      Overall, its the number of experiments, the accuracy, resolution and speed of data generation, and the need for that data to be analysed around the globe that has created the mutual need, and provision of huge bandwidths such as those being investigated and used by I2.

      For everyday folk like you and me, just go down to your accounting deparment and ask them how large their largest database is, you'll be suprised how unbelieveably data and bandwidth consuming financeal data has become since the revolution of the internet.
  • http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/13 48250&tid=95 [slashdot.org]

    For reference.

    I'm wondering. Would the bill apply to Internet2? Would it apply to any IP based network? Obviously not all IP networks are The Internet. At what point could educational establishments along with sympathetic corportations like Google and sites like slashdot start their own internetwork and leave the tiered internet crowd without google, ebay, amazon or any of the geeks who actually make the internet an interesting place to

  • Internet2 the internet of the future certa 1996 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by masterpenguin (878744) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:08AM (#15203362)
    Internet2 was announced in October 1996, now 10 years later it still seems to be poorly developed. Internet2 was going to be the net of the future. Now it is the future, and we still have a significant population unable to get broadband (I don't consider satalite internet feasable), and its still priced too high for other users.

    I'm all for advancing these new technologys, but too often it is forgotten that portions of the population can't even subscribe to an aging technology.

    The digital divide is still alive and well unfortunally.
    • Instead of Internet2 we just got Web 2.0. Bweeh.

    • Re:Internet2 the internet of the future certa 1996 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The Internet2 was never designed to bring broadband to the masses. I have no clue why you thought it was.

      The technology to do so already exists. The barrier is an economic one.

      • Re:Internet2 the internet of the future certa 1996 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by A beautiful mind (821714) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @06:31AM (#15203580)
        The barrier is a political/greed-based one.

        Otherwise please tell me how Japan managed their 100mbit/1gbit fiber to their users or if you want to bore us with the "but but Japan is much smaller and that can't be done in the USA" myth, then explain how Sweden - a huge country with relatively low population count - managed to get fibre to even small villages god knows where (A friend of mine in Sweden has fiber in a village of 500 people and according to him its not an exceptional thing).

        • No, it's not. (Score:5, Informative)

          by Kadin2048 (468275) <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Wednesday April 26 2006, @07:25AM (#15203713) Homepage Journal
          Japan has high population densities basically everywhere, so it's economically feasible to bring broadband everywhere. Nobody is very far from a local head-end installation (cable or telco), which is the limiting factor in bringing DSL and cable-Internet technologies to people in most places where it's not available now.

          I'm willing to bet that the same situation is true in Sweden: those "remote villages" you're talking about aren't very big, and they're probably easier to wire for broadband than typical suburban-sprawl America. Although I'm sure the overall population density of Sweden is very low, I'm pretty confident that the density is distributed unevenly: small clusters of relatively high density (a village), separated by great distances. So again, you can bring the backbone, via microwave relays or fiber probably, out to the village's headend / telco building (the DSLAM), and then from there most of the subscribers are probably within cable modem or DSL range.

          It's the same reason why I'm confident that Canada will achieve (if it hasn't already) greater broadband access than the U.S. to probably 80% of its population: a very large part of the population is concentrated in urban areas in a relatively small area of the country, contrary to what you'd expect if you just looked at an overall "persons per square mile" figure. Of course, that last 5-10% of people who don't live in the urban areas and are out in the Northern Territory or on farms in Saskatchewan are going to be a real bitch. In the U.S., we've already hit that limit: most people living in urban (and most suburban) areas have some type of broadband available. We're at that "last x percent" already, only in our case, x is very large due to the type of low density development that's common across much of the country.

          The corporate-conspiracy stuff may play well, but there's very little truth behind it. If it were economically feasible to give every trailer and farmhouse in the boondocks of Pigs Knuckle, IA broadband, I'm sure all the providers would be falling over themselves to do it. But you can only cover so much area with broadband from a DSLAM, it's a pretty much fixed radius (I'm not sure exactly for cable but on DSL it's generally ~18000 line-feet); if you don't have people clustered together, that quickly becomes impractical. Heck, there are still places where cable TV is impractical, and it has a much larger radius from the head-end than broadband.

          Wiring for broadband isn't a walk in the park. It's a pretty significant upgrade to systems that were only ever intended to carry frequencies up to a few thousand hertz, and whether you're a corporation or the government, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. It's not worth it to roll out $100,000 worth of infrastructure if it's only going to gain you 10 subscribers at forty bucks a month. Sure, you could subsidize the hell out of that development with tax money, but I think there are a whole lot of things that our taxes should be spent on (like, I don't know, teaching people to read) before we go throwing vast quantities of money at the problem, especially when the technology isn't mature. (And I think based on the lack of support for govt-subsidized Internet, this is pretty common.) We'd just barely have the whole country wired for 1MB cable and probably only be started paying off the trillions of dollars that it would cost, when people would be saying "one megabit?! Damn, man, you might as well be using 2400 baud. You can't do anything without [FTTN/FTTC/802.11n/$new_networking_technology]!" And we'd be off again.

          I remember it wasn't that long ago when people were talking about getting universally available Internet access. Not free Internet, not high-speed Internet, just the AVAILABILITY of a local ISP to everyone in the country, without having to make a long-distance call. I'm pretty sure we made it there sometime during the Boom, but did you hear anyone talk about it? I didn't. Because by the time we actually found that goal, people
          • All well and good.

            Now explain to me why, in even the most densely populated U.S. cities, the fastest available residential broadband is 3MB DSL or 5MB cable, and you cant't get any broadband for less than $55/month (total cost- those $29.99/month DSL packages you can get from your local phone company don't count because you can only get them if you are spending at least $35 a month on your phone bill.)

            Hmmm?

            I'd believe your arguments if the biggest U.S. cities had broadband access equivalent to Japan or Swed
        • Private enterprise doesn't see the value of sinking that much money into wiring areas that won't be able to pay for the cost. It works in Sweden because it isn't up to private enterprise to build the communications infrastructure.

          I really don't feel like paying to have everyone in the country wired, and I also don't feel like paying to subsidise anyone elses internet connection.

          I guess you are right, it is greed-based. It isn't in the best interest of private companies to piss away millions upon millions
    • This is somewhat offtopic, because the internet2 project was never supposed to address access for consumers. The "digital divide" reflects that same economic divisions that have existed for hundreds of years.

      You can't solve social problems by throwing technology at them.

    • Also keep in mind the Internet2 is strictly a breeding ground for new technologies to be developed and then later migrated into other internetworks.
    • Internet2 was announced in October 1996, now 10 years later it still seems to be poorly developed.

      Remember how Arpanet started almost 40 years ago? And when did it become popular, with the masses having real access (even if slow for your standards) and using it? Thirty years after its creation. Please hold off your whining about Internet2 for a decade, then we may talk.

  • Damn ! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ATAMAH (578546) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:33AM (#15203424)
    I better hurry, because i haven't yet downloaded everything from the *current* intarweb !

  • National Lambda Rail? (Score:4, Funny)

    by BlackMesaLabs (893043) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:35AM (#15203429)
    National Lambda Rail? No....You have to RIDE the rail, THEN you launch the Lambda SATELLITE.

  • hmmmmmm (Score:4, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @05:44AM (#15203447) Homepage Journal
    xcopy \internet \internet2\old /A /E /H

  • i am just curious why they are just going to build their next backbone with scaling up to 80 10gbps lambdas. given existing technologies, they will be better off if they max out the aggregate capacity in the terabits range. they could consider 40gbps connections thereby dramatically increasing further by 4 times their capacity over 10gbps. given that they use up the 10gbps bandwidth today, then 100gbps of initial capacity may not be enough given that it is now easier to enable computers with 10gbps conne
  • few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time ... Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for it's next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year.

    In honour of the Tri-Lambda crew, [nostalgiacentral.com] I think we should name the new network "Revenge of the Nets"

  • Why do Universities join Internet2? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mintech (93916) on Wednesday April 26 2006, @07:59AM (#15203905)
    I work for a University and we used to be a member of Internet2. While it was nice to have high-speed connections to other members of the Internet2, we quit because of the high costs and we could not justify the costs for a small University with less than 5,000 students.

    It costs at least $300,000 minimum per year to join Internet2. The fees are as follows:

    $30,000 Internet2 Membership fee (http://members.internet2.edu/Member-Dues.html [internet2.edu])
    $220,000 Abilene Membership fee for OC-12 (http://abilene.internet2.edu/community/fees/index .html [internet2.edu])

    Additional fees are assessed depending on which GigaPop you would be connected to (http://eng.internet2.edu/gigapoplist.html [internet2.edu]). The quote I had to become a member with one Gigapop was approximately $75,000 an year, plus local loop costs.

    It's very difficult for us, and probably most Universities, to justify spending over $300,000 a year to become a member of Internet2. Until Internet2 can be better managed and lower costs, I do not foresee Internet2 becoming popular anytime soon.
    • You make it sound impossible. The cheap way to do it is, team up with other colleges. One of them has the pipe going into them. You all pay for more manageable connections to them, onto the I2 network. You all split the costs. I know of several colleges that have taken this route. Hell, I know a COMMUNITY COLLEGE that's on I2.

      It is also highly useful for VTC work, which is getting to be a very big use for it.
    • If you're a small college why on earth do you need an OC-12? Also if you're connecting to a GigaPop you pay them for some portion of their connector fee. It even says that: "A Participant that is not also a Connector will not see this fee directly, but should expect to pay to its Connector its appropriate share of this fee (at the discretion of the Connector)." Overall you're talking something on the order of $50-100k for a small college. Considering that a T3 costs on the order of $100-150k/year, if yo

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