Internet2 Turns 15. Has It Delivered?

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."

IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Internet 2 come with IPv6, or is that extra?

Re:No

[Entrope]

That is a curious conjecture. I would think that Internet2's primary distinction from the commercial Internet is the speed of individual links. For most of Internet2's life -- in particular, the last three quarters of it -- commercial gear vendors have greatly increased link speeds, routing table capacity, capacity to handle routing changes and other "carrier grade" features. Vendors for edge routers have focused on distinguishing features like deep packet inspection. Do you allege that ISPs are at fault because they selected equipment, technology and approaches that were inferior to what Internet2 developed? If so, why?

Absolutely

[JambisJubilee]

(Disclaimer: I work at a European university and have collaborations with a university in the US)

Internet2 is absolutely a godsend. In my work, it allows the sharing of large, expensive cluster computers (which can generate huge datasets). Wouldn't be possible without Internet2.

As for advancing the state of the 'commodity' Internet, meh. The infrastructure pays for itself in shared resources alone.

Depends on how you define 'Delivered'

[mcnut]

Has Internet2 provided a network for Research and Education for 15 years, continuing to grow capacity with the needs of its community? yes. Has Internet2 built a set of middleware and tools that it has open-sourced for this same community to enhance the state of research and education network operations? yes. Has Internet2 pushed the boundaries of what router vendors support, Having IPv6 when it was still considered an 'advanced service' by most network device providers, multicast, and providing a Telepresence VOIP bridge? yeah.. they've done that too. So, I suppose it depends on how you define 'Delivered.' Full disclosure: I work for an institution which is an Internet2 Member.

Yes, no and I don't know.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I'd say that having an IP infrastructure solely for academic, research and non-commercial needs alone is an accomplishment and is a success.

I'd say that the lack of visible results by the common lay person, even technophiles, means that visibily the project has failed on some level. The fact that we haven't found a transition plan to IPv6 from the growing pains of I2 also means on some level, we're looking at some sort of failure(my personal hope of what we'd get from Internet2).

However, given that it's restricted access, the whole thing is largely up in the air and tech columnists and even technogeeks(Unless you're one of those academics who's pushing billions of records across the network to be processed through a giant cluster on the other side of the world) really can't comment on what I2 has achieved. Plus, what constitutes "success" is largely in the eye of the beholder. I doubt there will ever be a quantitative metric we could actually use to measure whether or not I2 is a success or not.

Despite that though, it's continued existence and growth, slow or not, does tell us that it wasn't a mistake, and it's not a failure, but it doesn't tell us whether or not it was a success, and if it is, by what measure.