Internet2 Turns 15. Has It Delivered? 120
stinkymountain writes "With nearly $100 million in new funding, Internet2, the faster, better Internet reserved for research and education, has embarked on an upgrade that will boost backbone capacity to a staggering 8.8Tbps and expand services to hundreds of thousands of libraries, schools and medical centers. Internet2 was created by 34 university research institutions in 1996, when the commercial and non-commercial branches of the Internet's evolutionary tree split off and went their separate ways. The mission of Internet2 was to provide reliable, dedicated bandwidth to support the ever-growing demands of the research and educational communities, and in doing so, to develop technologies that would advance the state of the 'commodity' Internet. Some say it has failed in that latter category."
No (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] to develop technologies that would advance the state of the 'commodity' Internet. Some say it has failed in that latter category.
I'd say that's a problem caused by the ISPs not by this initiative.
Re:No (Score:1, Insightful)
The whole point of Internet 2 was to not waste bandwidth on crap like Slashdot or Facebook and reserve it for academic needs. It was never intended to replace or improve what the internet is now, but rather to recreate what the internet was originally envisioned as. I would say that it has failed in that regard to some extent though, because the unavoidable fact of the matter is if you give college students an assload of bandwidth, they're going to waste it on stupid crap.
Re:How woud I know? (Score:5, Insightful)
You pay taxes for fighter jets as well, but no one is going to let you fly them.
Also particle accelerators, rockets, deep sea submersibles, aircraft carriers, police cars, and all kinds of other things. What's the point?