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Technology

Internet2 Update 112

fm6 writes "The MIT Technology Review has done a status report on Internet2, the bandwidth-intensive sequel to the Internet. What's really exciting is the way people are already using this technology: virtual nanomanipulation, online surgical procedures, even telepresence opera. Lots of interesting links."
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Internet2 Update

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Thousands of bozos with stupid Internet2 business models that can't make money and another speculative stock market bubble that puts the Dutch Tulip Boom to shame.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    What good is it to be able to synchronize operas 600 miles away, when I still need to suck shit through a 56kbps straw?

    i2 is not for The People, that's for sure.

    --ybc

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't anyone bothered by the fact they want commercial apps to use the same Internet as critical life dependant operations?
    Shouldn't we keep these two things seperate?
    It's only a matter of time before someone dies due to lag and it's not going to be in an online game, I don't care how fast/stable a network is, it's gunna crash, just ask Microsoft right about now.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    they could've called in Naked Internet 2.5. I'm sure that would attract more users.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13, 2001 @09:50AM (#86570)
    Nanomanipulation? Virtual surgery? The only thing that could keep I2 alive is pr0n. And lots of it.
  • I fail to see what the big deal is with Internet2. If I had an OC3 (the 155mbit link they talked about in the article) from my house to my work, I could do cool videoconferencing too, using the plain old Internet1. QOS can be implemented lots of different ways (MPLS, ATM, various IP only schemes) using today's technology and lots of bigger network providers already have enough pipe to give people tons of bandwidth. I haven't seen anything that would convince me that I2 is anything more than I1 with way less users (which doesn't mean those things don't exist, I just haven't seen them).
  • An OC12 is 3gigs per second and those are deployed all over the place. Qwest has already deployed OC768 which is 400gigs per second IIRC. And this is all to support the original internet. Fatter pipes doesn't make Internet version 2, it just makes a faster Internet v1.
  • Whoops, I meant OC48 is 3gigs. And I also meant OC768 is 40gbps. It's been a long day. :) But my point remains the same.
  • The Internet2 Update will be happening tomorrow. Please reboot your computers tomorrow night.



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  • so now I can suck down the entire contents

    Yeah, right. If there's more bandwith, there will be more spam to sift through, and more articles to pull. And, that will only add to the missing parts. Unless there's a curve, you're unlikely to ever get a full feed.



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  • Two reasons that won't happen:

    The technology is going to migrate to the normal internet, so the normal internet will be able to do all of this. The main difference right now is that the people on Internet2 have really good connections to it, while the people on the Internet generally don't. But they'll get good connections to the regular Internet, not good connections to Internet2.

    The Internet grew so much for largely cultural reasons: people who had been on it in research and academic contexts left those contexts, but wanted to maintain their ties. So they figured out ways to get internet connections from other sources. Soon, the people they knew from other contexts wanted to interact the same way, and everyone was getting online. This won't happen with internet2, because everyone on it is likely to be on the normal internet. They'll just use that once they leave, possibly bringing their applications over if they can get the bandwidth.

    After all, Internet2 is essentially the same thing as the regular internet, except with only two backbones and few non-experimental programs.
  • I need the Internet 2, and soon.

    Based upon preliminary projections, within a year, the linux kernel will be approximately 1.2GB for the newest version's source code. And since I have to get the newest version the day it comes out, my DSL won't cut it.

    Plus, there's all the porn. The luscious, high quality porn. Since it's an acedemic network, does that mean the porn will be free?

  • even better! those pop ads will spy on you!
  • We're talking about up to 2.4 gigabits per second. 155 mbit is just the _minimum_
  • Said one student, "I know it's extracurricular, but I'm looking forward to disecting the Jar-Jar Binks model."

    If ever a line needed to be preserved, say as someone's sig file...

  • "Hard to conceive of a phone as a radio."

    Not for those of us who worked at stations where the network news and the high school football games were piped to the studio over lines leased from the telephone company.

    Also, years ago (pre-WWII) there were juke boxes where you chose your selection and it was played at a remote location and sent to your location over a telephone line.

  • more pr0n than you can shake a stick at.

  • QoS (quality of service) is not just about giving one class of traffic priority over another - you typically allocate a guaranteed share of bandwidth to each class, and in some cases limit the maximum usable by one class.

    Also, QoS only currently works on private IP networks - there is no way of billing QoS traffic used to a user or content provider at present in the Internet, and this is unlikely to happen given that QoS has taken a long time to take off even in private networks.

    Each customer of a service provider offering a QoS service buys a certain amount of Voice, Premium, Standard and Best Effort traffic (to use some common names for classes of service) for each site, e.g. 1 Mbps of Voice and 2 Mbps of Premium for their New York office. The provider won't let them send more than 1 Mbps of traffic from that site marked as Voice, i.e. it 'polices' the traffic against the customer contract for that site.

    This means that any QoS abuse would be limited to that customer's QoS service, and would have NO extra impact on the network compared to normal customer usage of QoS.

    If you have proper security, both email abuse and QoS abuse can be prevented - since QoS abuse would be much more costly to the customer (by stopping business applications from working over the network), it would be stamped on much more quickly. But, like voicemail and toll fraud, it will probably always happen - it's a question of preventing as much as possible, and detecting and stopping it as quickly as possible when it does happen, as Bruce Schneier has been saying for a while.
  • Internet2 is IPv6, right? Which I think has some sort of additional security stuff (maybe not).
  • And in a few years, it will be opened up to the public. It will become 3-D Porn, obnoxious teenagers who can't spell, bad music being traded all around, pop-up adds with full symphonic sound, and all the original users will complain about all the newbies...

    It already is. It's called college. :-)

  • Yeah, you seem to be right. http://www.internet2.edu/ipv6/.
  • Certainly there are users of IPv6 on I2, but it is not strictly an IPv6 network. It is based on IPv4 TCP/IP just like I1.

    -B
  • I've done work on I2 so I have some experience in the matter.

    -B
  • Whenever you read something about potential uses of the OC based Internet2 they use buzz words like telepresence and virtual reality. These Gibsonian geek concepts don't mean shit to 99.999% of people. This is sort of ridiculous because it ignores some really obvious uses of fibre being ubitquitous.
    You open up a single screen theater in a real estate sparse section of downtown where a dot com used to have its headquarters. You get a digital projector and a fibre line hooked up. You can download Disney or Dreamworks latest and greatest animated musical tearjerker directly from the studio to play during the day. That night you switch to that summer's blockbuster you downloaded the other night and stored on a disk array. For the late showings you put on a cult classic that draws a modest but frequest crowd of college kids and twenty somethings. You make good returns and respectable margins because you've cut the cost of the film print out of the equation. Costs now for such a setup might be high but in a world where both these technologies are commonplace the costs are affordable.
  • Oh, well then. Everything important is covered. Great!

    When exactly did it become a requirement that the US include other counties in every research project it does? Quit whining, you'll still benefit from the results eventually.

  • Just wait. The New England Journal of Medicine has an upcoming interview with the groundbreaking gynocologist, Dr. F. Diddler.

    --
  • You don't need Interenet2 for that. I've gotten speeds of over 350 kB/s (that's 2800 kb/s, or 2.73 Mb/s) on my cable modem. Still, that is a nice speed.

    --
  • Internet2 is restricted to academic sites (universities) and scientific research facilities. Its purpose is not extra bandwidth for consumer ISPs.
  • /me slaps yabtah in the funny bone and tell him to read the previous article about isp content payments.
  • How long until I start getting AOL2 CDs in my mailbox?
  • VBNS is great, as long as you're at one of 185 universities, browsing another of 185 universities. big fat pipes are useless if you can't afford enough of them, and without the US DOD tossing some contract money into the kitty, 98% of Internet 1 users will continue to not know and not care about Internet 2. it's a floor model, an expensive prototype, but it's not going to be rolled in anytime soon.
  • And in a few years, it will be opened up to the public. It will become 3-D Porn, obnoxious teenagers who can't spell,

    And you think the spam is bad now? From the article:

    Researchers are also looking at ways to give some data transmissions higher priority than others. By marking the data as "urgent," researchers can make sure real-time video of surgeries cross the network before less time-sensitive data such as e-mail.

    It doesn't matter what criteria are used to decide what's high-priority, spammers will find a way to abuse it. All of their email will suddenly become "absolutely the highest priority ever," squashing yours, and if some rules like "real-time video takes priority over email" are tried, well, now you have television commercials squashing out oeverything else.

    Give high-priority rights to select organizations like hospitals? Only works until the professional spammers buy their way in, or just flat out forge the keys.

    Sorry, I'm in a bad mood right now. Just got more spam. There isn't a single useful thing that we in the CS community can come up with that some cocksucking marketer can't abuse.

  • If I were a spammer, I wouldn't care whether the million emails I just sent took 3 seconds or 3 hours to reach their destinations, as long as they did. I certainly wouldn't want to pay for increased priority, given the only reason spammers can make money is that their costs are nearly zero.
  • Um, because universities are free to do with their money whatever they see fit? And somehow I don't blame them for starting a new, clean, high performance network with restricted access for academic purposes ONLY instead of merrily pumping more money into more bandwidth for Joe Freeloader's porn-surfing pleasure.

    At least that would be my answer to this question...
  • In June, the consortium announced it now had member universities in all 50 states.

    Oh, well then. Everything important is covered. Great!

  • Don't forget the FPS and MMORPG's......

  • VBNS is just one peered network that makes up Internet2. vBNS is actually being phased out, since its mostly obselete. Abilene is the future. As for it being a "floor model", I can very much assure you that Internet2 is alive, active, and growing. I know this because I work for Internet2.
  • Internet2 is a research network. Its network engineers are developing the technolgies that will one day be used on the public Internet. The fruits of the Internet2 project will be seen by the adoption of its technolgies by the public Internet, but the networks that make up Internet2 will be private for as long as there is the funding to keep it so.
  • This Daniel Tynan guy really went all-out with his topic titles:

    A Time Machine
    History of the Future
    The Fast Lane
    Across the Universe
    To Infinity... and Beyond
    Nano a Nano
    Cyber Collaboration
    The Abdominal Showman *- my favorite
    You Are There... Almost
    Work Trek: The Next Generation *- runner-up
    Reality Programming
    A Question of Quality
    May the Market Force Be with You
  • by eAndroid ( 71215 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @09:41AM (#86605) Homepage
    WHat I really want to know is how many Rocket Arena 3 servers are on it?
  • Internet2 has arrived. Time to invest in those hot teledildonics stocks.
  • I had the opportunity to talk to one of the original Mosaic/Netscape developers once, and I asked him about . He said it had been put in by one of his colleagues as a joke, as in 'Haha, how could anyone ever be so stupid as to use this tag?'. Can't say I'm surprised. :)
  • Will the ISPs charge extra for content provided along this Newnet?
  • What I use I2 for:

    Quake 3 Arena.

  • Are there certain types of fibre I should stay away from....

    I'm told that wool fibres are very poor at getting speeds above a typical dial-up connection. Hemp fibres reportedly max out at sub-ISDN speeds. ;)

  • I can only assume that you weren't an english 'proffesor' at MIT
  • Internet2 operates identically to the current Internet. The only difference is priority routing for connections between two Internet2 sites.
    For all intensive purposes however everything is the same.
  • The Dutch president of the National Aviation Board: Dr. Brick.
  • Whats so fantastic about that? I can do that from home. I pay 20$ (well, 200 swedis kroner) for a 10 mbs connection. When it's coming up to 10-20 MByte/s and i no longer need to store thing on my harddrive, thats when things is getting interesting.
  • What I want to know is why should universites and such start a whole new internet when the money could be better spend upgrading current hardware. the Internet2 is fine and dandy, but it's really just an extension of the internet(1) and we should upgrade speeds to that of internet2 with our existing hardware.

    The current Internet and the protocols used to support communication, transfers etc have serious flaws. Internet v1 wasn't designed to do what we're using it for. Upgrading the current protocols to support things like security, authentication, etc is no small task. There are millions of users around the world using countless different devices. Adding security features to IP (unless we're encapsulating protocol levels) requires a change to the standard and rewrite of everyone's communication software.

    New Internet = what we're all dreamed about (new design & start from scratch)

  • I can't resist, I just can't...
    more pr0n than you can shake a stick at.
    It's not a stick you'd be shaking, but it's close...
  • ... telepresence opera ...

    This may be off-topic, but what is funny is that one of the original supposed "killer applications" for telephones by mr. Bell et al, was listening to symphonies using telephone. I mean, the idea was that people could listen to real live mysic played by trained symphony orchestras, "broadcasted" by telephone lines.

    It now sounds ridiculous, of course, because of the low sound quality and all, but I guess they were both imaginative (innovative? or is that (tm) by BillySoft?) and desperate for marketing stuff, even back then. Similar to how things like "videophones", "speech input", "3d UI", "video-on-demand" and such are being pushed all the time, even though apprarently few people really want or need them (see Jakob Nielsen's inteview for references on "speech input" and "3d UI", if you think I'm just trolling... he has good reasoning about their problems... they are sexy, but they will only have niches, if even that).

  • So. . . .

    I have a cable modem.

    My ISP doesn't cap my download rates.

    You know what 2MBp/s is like on a residential line? Let me tell you, its SWEET!

    I can stream 640x480 VHQ QuickTime Video (Very High Quality). I don't even know how high of quality MPEG4 I could stream.

    Oh wait, yes I do, DVD quality, thats what! For that matter, I could stream TWO DVD quality movies right on down my line. No reason as to why not, its about a 1gig file for a DVD quality movie (depending on the person doing the judgment of quality of course) in MPEG4. I can download 640megs in under 10 minutes. 2 hours? Heh, easy.

    Oh wait.

    No online sites GIVE me that type of bandwidth on a regular basis. I can easily take up an entire T1 line (T1s are obsolete now days anyways, their bandwidth goes almost nowheres), and shoot, even a T3 can only handle a very few cable modem users.

    OC3 anyone? Even OC3s could not handle the types of crowds that a multimedia website would have to draw in order to sustain itself (if it ever could with the banner ad market being like it is).

    Yes, the backbones are crowded, but that is really not even the largest problem. Shit, more backbones can be made easily. @Home has taken this approuch, I get a ping of 30 all up and down the west coast. Shit, there are days when I do not get pings that low on my own LAN.

    Why not redefine the networks structure instead? Rather then havine one, two, or even three sites to get a file from, why not have local access hubs where all major multimedia content is stored and passed on to the users requesting it? After all, if 10,000 users on the west coast are requesting the same multimedia stream from Dnver, why not just send that media stream to a local west coast access point and then didstribute it to the consumers from there? You'd likely have to have multiple access points, not just one for the entire west coast would do it, but 2 or 3 would for the coastal states.

    Hell, think about it. You'd have less data going across the main pipelines, and the local access points would be distributing the same amount of data if they where just large regional routing centers anyways. (I'm thinking of using the GigaPOPs obviously). The distribution centers would not have reason to charge any sort of money for their service (it could just be implemented as part of the routers) since technicaly they would not be using up any more resources then they would otherwise be using up under the current system. It's like multicasting, but ISPs would actualy cooperate! (yah right).

    Shit, getting the data from the distribution point to the end user would then be a cinch. If ISPs do their job correctly (once again, another
    'yah right') then their local networks should not be too clogged up. Any half assed broadband provider should at least be offering their consumers 2048kbit service, which is actualy a mere 256KBp/s. While DSL users are pretty much fucked on this one, those of us out there enjoying more lucritive services would be quite happy with the service presented to us.

    The first mile has a bandwidth blockage folks. Bigging fatter wires running around isn't going to solve the problem forever. If you can make it so that you don't need quite so many bigger fatter wires, then you have partialy elivated the problem for the long term. After all, a permanite reduction in need, is, well, very -very-long term.

    That

    and I want

    really really -really- fucking want

    my high ass end DVD quality videos.

    Fuck.

    its the 21st century.

    I didn't get my flying cars, or my talking intelligent robots, or even a colony on the moon (not to mention mars).

    I at least want a fucking video on my computer that I don't have to illegialy pir@te from some source, or that isn't an old 60's B movie. For fucks sake, I have the bandwidth NOW GIVE ME MY DAMN ENTERTAINMENT!
  • How nice, now just hand over the DVDs and I'll be happy.

    Quite frankly I don't care if its acronyme is R.A.P.E (not that -ANY- program would -EVER- use that as an acro, ::grins:: ) shit, I just want my entertainment damnit! Got a fast ass CPU, got a fast ass Cable Modem, got the best damn fucking 2d card on the market (Matrox, w00t), but nobodies offering up pure entertainment!
  • Readers of a UK bent might be interested in the latest upgrade to JANET [ja.net], the Joint Academics Network. This is the primary backbone supplier to (all?) Universities and (some) Further Education Colleges in the UK.

    SuperJANET4 [superjanet4.net] currently has a 2.5Gbps SDH optical backbone, rising to 20Gbps in 2002 using DWDM. At various points across the contry are JANET Connection Points (JCPs) to which Metroplitan Area Networks (MANs) are connected: these MANs then supply the universities with bandwidth. These MANs are being upgraded in concert with JANET - the London MAN, as an example, is moving to a 2.5Gbps backbone, with 100Mbps feeds to individual universities.

    QoS was a key factor in designing the network and thus the routers chosen (Cisco 12016s and 12008s) support Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) (see RFC 2702 [faqs.org] for why this is good for QoS) amongst other QoS features.

    JANET's link to the rest of the internet is being upgraded too, with 2.5Gbps of external bandwidth and 622Mbps transatlantic bandwidth - to Internet2.

    In the past, the UK academic community has been on the ball with internetworking - from the invention of packet-switched data networks (1967) and the first ARPAnet node outside the US at University College London (1974) to one of the earliest and largest (and still very large) deployments of web caching with Squid (the JANET webcache [ja.net]). Not to mention that the web was invented by a British academic... (although he was working in Switzerland at the time... does that count? :p )

    If only our commercial managers were as bright... then we wouldn't have The Great British Broadband Farce.
    Hmmm, now can I steal 802.11 wireless from my local university? I'm sure they'd never notice now :)

  • From the article :
    Thanks to Internet2, scientists have used the nanoManipulator to conduct experiments as far away as Redmond
    "I can reproduce !" he said, "and I will !"

    scary...
  • You never heard of namephreaks [google.com]?

    __

  • All DWMP does is squeeze more data into existing pipes. It does nothing about the current Internet's inability to marshall big gobs of data quickly and reliabily.

    __

  • Considering the quality of posts lately, perhaps it's time.
  • What I want to know is why should universites and such start a whole new internet when the money could be better spend upgrading current hardware. the Internet2 is fine and dandy, but it's really just an extension of the internet(1) and we should upgrade speeds to that of internet2 with our existing hardware.

  • I2 is not intended to be a replacement for the Internet. It is used as a high bandwidth connection between universities and government agencies. It is also a proving ground for new technologies before they are added to the Internet.
  • This got me thinking:

    One huge stumbling block is the so-called "last mile" connection. When the Internet2 faithful talk about broadband, they're speaking of a world where every computer is connected at 100 megabits per second or faster.

    Actually, it is quite realistic to get some optical fibers in the house around here now, and I'm considering it.

    It will require a fair amount of digging ditches, and you wouldn't want to dig ditches too often, so I have to make sure that what I put in those ditches won't need to be upgraded for many years to come.

    So, pretending this is "Ask Slashdot", what are the pitfalls?

    Are there certain types of fibre I should stay away from, certain things that would prohibit me from going higher than say, 100Mbits/s, or certain things that will make the physical infrastructure incompatible with everything else?

  • 10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. When it comes online, it too will be hooked to Internet2.

    Oh, that's really great! I've been at that site three times (the NOT [not.iac.es]), and the net connection from the mountain is really bad. It sure needs a lot of improvement. I know they've had some tests where the NOT has been remotely controlled, but it is not for mainstream use. The problem is that you sometimes need to download the picture at once after readout to decide what you should do for the next exposure, but on a slow connection, you will waste a lot of very valuable observing time waiting for an image to download. A typical image is 2048x2048 pixels, 16 bits, pluss header information. Hope we get a bit of that bandwidth the GTC [gtc.iac.es] is getting... :-) I've been on the construction site when it was just being dug out.

  • by sulli ( 195030 )
    don't you mean the stuff-to-comment-on-at-length-without-reading dept.? That's more normal /. behavior...
  • oops!! I didn't mean you weren't on i2. I just meant that the performance you got wasn't unique to me...

    can I self-moderate (0, Dumbass)?

  • You're just on a fast connection with good peering. You can buy those from major ISPs now, and have been able to for years...
  • For their part, John Hopkins will blah blah blah...

    The school's name is Johns Hopkins. Sorry to be so anal, but I'm programmed to respond that way whenever anyone calls it "John" Hopkins, being a native Marylander. For this same reason, any mention of Indianapolis causes me to say that the city sucks. ;)

    ----------

  • I2 is great... biggest problem is the chicken/egg thing: we need bandwith to do stuff (major use so far, for us (college in midwest)(teleconferences & tele-classess) but the state doesn't want to give us funding for bandwith because we don't use what we have.

    Politicians don't understand that it isn't a matter of how much bandwith you use, it's how much you need to have avaiable to do certain things.

    Typical quote: "Just look you guessed only used 5% of your bandwith last month." Yeah, but when we use it, we use it ALL!

    Sigh. Anyway, I2 is great. People are just really getting turned on to the possibilities. Me, being on the technical side of things, where I use to make a phone call and talk to other universities about major technical problems/issues, now we get together and have teleconferences.

  • Then we'll realize that the bottleneck is the servers themselves:
    I work as a System Management Unit leader for one of the biggest Swiss companies.
    I administer big -public oriented- servers which have to handle hundreds/thousands? Of https simultaneous connections.
    I just consider how responsive some of our Top End (E10K, HP, AIX) servers are during the rush hours (whether I access these with my home cable connection or from the company's local - Gigabyte - network, I hardly see any difference...)...
    If they want to make it faster, then they'll have to upgrade all the servers, replace the Broadvision shit with some real application framework, replace the Frontpage coders with professional coders who know how painful it si to connect through a 2400bauds modem and then they might get something.
    When we'll be on the Internet2, we might not notice any real difference under strict conditions until the providers themselves upgrade.
    Maybe they'll have to wait some more to make it carry television streams or voice/IP.
    --
  • It doesn't matter what criteria are used to decide what's high-priority, spammers will find a way to abuse it. All of their email will suddenly become "absolutely the highest priority ever," squashing yours, and if some rules like "real-time video takes priority over email" are tried, well, now you have television commercials squashing out oeverything else.

    I would think the priorities would be channel-assigned. For instance, if I head over to Slashdot, a channel is opened, with the ad being highest priority (to make sure I see it), the text being next highest, and finally the images. Other, graphics intensive sights could make the graphics a higher priority.

    But, I could assign the whole Slashdot channel a lower priority than the email channel.

    But you are right - I'm thinking as a programmer, trying to come up with solutions rather than deal with the underlying problem, which is that, as you said,

    There isn't a single useful thing that we in the CS community can come up with that some cocksucking marketer can't abuse.
    I think the researchers realize this, and simply want to put into the protocols some way that the tele-conference surgery gets higher priority than the pron or the spam. Good luck.
  • The school's name is Johns Hopkins. Sorry to be so anal, but I'm programmed to respond that way whenever anyone calls it "John" Hopkins...

    That's OK - I'm anal as well - I'd even say thank you, if Slashdot allowed us to make spelling corrections to previous posts...

    BTW, interesting Sig. I forget the terms from logic, but is the corollary that if someone's sig is intellegent, that they are intellegent?

  • It really does look like Internet2 is to the present Internet like the present Internet was to DARPANet (or the equivalent).

    Just look - Internet2 is restricted to academics and researchers, just like the old Internet was restricted to universities and government researchers. It's being used for collaboration and "what-if" scenarios, and most that are currently involved have a good idea who the others are. They are even practicing high culture, trying out live colaborative opera.

    And in a few years, it will be opened up to the public. It will become 3-D Porn, obnoxious teenagers who can't spell, bad music being traded all around, pop-up adds with full symphonic sound, and all the original users will complain about all the newbies...

  • by JWhitlock ( 201845 ) <[John-Whitlock] [at] [ieee.org]> on Friday July 13, 2001 @10:57AM (#86638)
    Almost all the benefit (including the workability of QOS) comes from the fact that they have limited who has access to the network and thus have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. It's the internet culture of the late nineteen eighties, running on the hardware of the early two thousand naughts.

    But they also have the lessons learned over the last 15 years or so of the commercial internet...

    The folks that turned the web over to the world probably had no idea what would happen. Who would have thought that pretty pictures and design would be more important than content? That marketers would plague the web with spam, banner ads, and pop-ups? Who would have guessed that it would eventually have to carry live video? Who would have predicted the backlash against blinking text?

    They can watch the original Internet, and plan a little to make sure they encourage good uses and discourage bad ones. For instance, they are optimizing it so "important" things get transfered more reliably than "unimportant" things, and are trying to make it work before the world gets it's hands on it.

    Just a few of the possible areas for improvement:

    Smarter IP addressing, both for increased number space and to help out routers (geographically based top-level numbers?)

    Basic Protocols that are written assuming hacking attempts rather than optimized for sharing information

    Priority transmission for time-critical applications (such as surgery).

    Low-level broadcast protocols.

    Micro- or Macro-payment support.

    Better business models by design.

    Your favorite extension here

    I, for one, think it's a good thing - develop the next generation, in a real prototype state, get it 95% there, then unleash the world on it. When that's done, start on the next next-generation Internet.

    We need reasons to buy more expensive hardware, anyway...

  • Don't forget the FPS and MMORPG's......

    I can see it now...

    QUAKE 6: TELE-SURGERY ANNOUNCED

    John Carmack took some time off from crusing the Autobahn for a Intenet2 Virtual Conference to announce Quake 6 (subtitled Tele-Surgery), for release in Q1, 2010.

    Hallmarked as the first collaboration between a game company and a medical university, the game promises to fully realize the potential of the new Internet2 to both allow long-distance research as well as teenager-oriented ultra-violence.

    For their part, John Hopkins will benefit from the improved human models introduced in Quake 5, with their fully realized internal organ structure. They will also benefit from the thousands-strong mod community, which constantly updates the Quake models for better representation of the human body. These improved representations will allow medical students to practice their craft on virtual humans, rather than cadavers or live patients.

    Said one student, "I know it's extracurricular, but I'm looking forward to disecting the Jar-Jar Binks model."

    For their part, ID software will get live updates from actual surgeries, to help make gibs look even better in real-time. They will also get access to the unused cadavers, for "modeling, modification, and shot-reaction research", as one programmer stated. When asked about zombie-research, the programmer stated "No Comment."

    Columbine parents stated they would proactively sue the game company for future school shooting incidents by current pre-adolescents. ID lawyers stated they will not settle, but instead take it to court. "By the time this suit gets through appeals, the children in question will be in medical school, inspired into a career in medicine by an early exposure to the human body. Time will prove us correct."

    At the end of the press conference, Carmack added "No, it won't run on your system."

  • The minimum connection speed is a blistering 155 megabits per second-a hundred times faster than a typical university lab connection and almost 3,000 times faster than a dial-up modem.

    Wow, maybe some of those universities need to upgrade their LocalTalk, or whatever they wired their labs with... I hear there's a new 10 megabits per second standard called "Ethernet" that's coming out of DEC really soon now.

  • That's the last thing I want to try out. Just imagine the outcome after the first DOS attack, or when the idiot construction workers cut the backbone. Why do people insist on touting never-before-attempted-and-completely-irresponsibl e-and-idiotic uses for new technology?
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @10:13AM (#86642)
    ... "At first, Telesco had trouble getting the infrared images to come through Gemini's firewall."

    That's a pretty good firewall, it prevents evil h4x0rs from damaging the equipment by overheating with those dangerous infrared files.

  • You should check out http://www.ipv6.org/ [ipv6.org]. The security will be much better with ipv6.
  • There isn't a single useful thing that we in the CS community can come up with that some cocksucking marketer can't abuse.

    i need that on a t shirt. maybe for the next meeting i have with the pr team.

    --saint
    ----
  • Nanomanipulation and virtual surgery are code words for porn. Nanomanipulation is what people are doing while looking at it, and you have to admit that some sex acts are more invasive than surgery.
  • by GeneOff ( 238946 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @11:15AM (#86646)
    One of the problems with Internet2 usually mentioned is the extreme bandwidth requirements. Estimates on this place the total digital capacity at around a dedicated 100 Mbps for every man woman and child on the planet by around 2010.

    Of course that doesn't take into account the geographical separation of the human species and that the chromatic dispersion increases dramatically over even short distances. All 6.5B of us would have to live within a few kilometers of each other. Too crowded for my taste. More can be found at SciAm [sciam.com] and at a previous Slashdot story [slashdot.org]

  • You don't need Interenet2 for that. I've gotten speeds of over 350 kB/s (that's 2800 kb/s, or 2.73 Mb/s) on my cable modem.

    The problem's not at the ends, either server or receiver, it's the middle, where most people live in areas where we all go through a 300 kb/s max speed pipe. Until we get good relays and fat pipes, which is what Internet2 is all about, the real difference between the next-to-lowest speed of DSL and the highest speed is virtually nil, unless it's locally cached or served, cause it has to get there first.

    And this is where the priority bits in IPv6 become useful - we can have high, mid, and low priority - and I'm hoping spam gets 0 priority, so I can buy a service where only 1 or higher priority packets arrive at my destination ...

  • by Cyph ( 240321 )
    Couldn't they have come up with a more creative name for the sequel?
  • "First post on the Internet2 -- EVER!"
    Fear it, even if it's probably way too late at this point. :)
  • Internet2 rocks because I can download linux distro ISO's at 800 kb/s. Yay for university internet connection.
  • No...I'm on internet2, unless this traceroute lies: 1 ntc-1-rsmx.rswitch.umn.edu (160.94.6.126) 1.021 ms 1.083 ms 0.927 ms 2 tc1x.router.umn.edu (192.168.30.21) 2.321 ms 1.164 ms 1.076 ms 3 mn-2-a10-97.r.greatplains.net (164.113.243.130) 2.001 ms 1.693 ms 1.353 ms 4 mn-2-abilene-mn.r.greatplains.net (164.113.246.193) 22.672 ms 22.159 ms 22.414 ms 5 clev-ipls.abilene.ucaid.edu (198.32.8.26) 29.079 ms 28.329 ms 28.898 ms 6 nycm-clev.abilene.ucaid.edu (198.32.8.30) 40.674 ms 40.548 ms 41.389 ms 7 border-abilene-oc3.advanced.org (209.211.237.97) 42.600 ms 42.433 ms 42.041 ms 8 www.internet2.edu (209.211.239.208) 42.432 ms 42.291 ms 42.343 ms
  • (damn HTML formatting :( )
  • I read a similar thing in a "HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE" article someplace - sorry no link. Neat thing was that some Easter European countries were using their phone lines for something like what Mr. Bell had envisioned. If I remember correctly (not likely, to many 40's in my college days) the last one was dismantled in the 60's. Hard to conceive of a phone as a radio. But hey, if it works...
  • The article clearly states that the I2 was (is being?) built from the start to be simpler than the current internet. It's a rebuild, not an upgrade. A replacement more than an enhancement. Cisco had to create new routers for it. The backbone uses completely new high-bandwidth wiring, which I suppose could be used on the current internet, but would be overkill. Most machines on the I2 have a direct connection to the backbone or a special high speed intermediary connection. These are different than the current direct connections to the internet. Please read the article before trolling.

    ---
  • by aredubya74 ( 266988 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @10:48AM (#86656)
    Astronomer Charlie Telesco figures that if he can't go to the mountain, he can always bring the mountain to his monitor.

    You've got to be kidding me. There's an astronomer named "Telesco"? I'm surprised they didn't interview a chemist named Fred Hydrocarbo.

  • In the article it mentions that they plan to bring this to elementary schools...aren't there others who need it just a teensy bit more? While I understand that there are large educational opportunities here, I think we need to worry about every college & highschool having it before we even start to think about giving it to grade schoolers.

    Pretty soon little Bobby is going to come home and announce that he has a better internet connection at school than his dad, who is a M$ employee, has at work.
  • So yeah, should be amusing to see when THIS will be available.....
  • I'm very proud to notify you that here in Brazil we are also using internet, not only for teleconference, but also to telepresence. Including medical telepresence, experiences with surgical telepresence, and also multimedia transmition. All with colaboration with Brazilian and foreing colleges and universities(including american ones)

    It's very nice to see Brazilian technologies walking side by side with the world.

  • by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @09:54AM (#86666) Journal
    I think the key point here is:

    Though these backbones are similar to those on the commercial Internet, only about three million users can access Internet2, versus several hundred million on the public Net.

    Almost all the benefit (including the workability of QOS) comes from the fact that they have limited who has access to the network and thus have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. It's the internet culture of the late nineteen eighties, running on the hardware of the early two thousand naughts.

    -- MarkusQ

  • And in a few years, it will be opened up to the public.

    While I agree Internet2 technology will be open to the public, it won't be available in a few years. A few decades is more realistic. Hell, most people still can't get the full benefits of the current infrastructure. About 95% of Internet users are connected by 56K (or lower) modems. The infrastructure for DSL and cable (1 - 10 Mbps) is by no means complete, never mind one for 100+ Mbps. From the article: "Right now about 95 percent of U.S. netizens access the Internet using 56K modems; upgrading the public infrastructure to achieve 10,000 times that level of performance could take decades."

    While I would love to surf Internet2: Revenge of the Nerds, I realistically won't be able to for quite a while.

    Apologizing in advance if I sound like a whiny bitch,
  • by JBowz15 ( 451573 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @10:01AM (#86668)
    I hope that the Internet2 is to the Internet what ESPN2 is to ESPN... More Xtreme!

    But then again, sequels usually suck.
  • by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @09:55AM (#86669) Homepage Journal
    I wonder, will the new set of protocols governing this new network allow for more security protection than is current in today's world of TCP and UDP?
  • I failed to find any hard data regarding the speed of Internet 2, but I have been told that the FUNET-network in Finland is already as fast as Internet 2 is, and has been for some time now.

    http://www.csc.fi/suomi/funet/verkko.html.en
  • ...the way people are already using this technology: virtual nanomanipulation...

    Ahh, but how's the virtual tittymanipulation? What else is the net good for but bomb recipes and yak pr0n?
  • by caudron ( 466327 ) on Friday July 13, 2001 @10:05AM (#86676) Homepage
    Internet2 is great and I have no doubt that it'll have a serious impact on daily life, but the cost to roll out something like that to the general public is outrageous. We, John.Q.Public, will be using the plain old Internet for a while. That's why I have more interest in technologies like Dense Wave Division Multiplexing, that help us out in our current infrastructure and consequently will impact us in the home much sooner than the UberNet this article talks about.

    Oh, fyi, since I mention it, here's where you can find more about DWDM:
    http://www.ericsson.com/technology/DWDM.shtml
    http://www.atmdigest.com/WDMResources.htm
    http://www.iec.org/tutorials/dwdm/

    Tom

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