Concept Development

What is Internet-2? Why does it exist? What benefits is it producing?

“Internet2 is a consortium led by over 220 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.” (https://www.wpi.edu/.../Internet2/about.html)

Over the years and as the Internet gained popularity, universities were the first organizations to recognize the limitations of bandwidth as it relates to data transfer rates and the need to share information and collaborate with other research institutes, universities, and colleagues. The need to support high performance applications and share information lead to the creation of the vBNS or very-high-performance Backbone Network Service in 1995 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2).

With a consortium of various investors and partnerships including the National Science Foundation, MCI, Qwest, Level3, and 30+ universities, Internet2 was formed. Through this consortium “Internet2 provides the U.S. research and education community with a network that satisfies their bandwidth-intensive requirements. The network itself is a dynamic, robust and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network. It furnishes a 100 Gbit/s network backbone to more than 210 U.S. educational institutions, 70 corporations and 45 non-profit and government agencies.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2)

Their goals include creating and maintaining a leading-edge network, exploiting broadband capabilities through new-generation applications, and new network services for all levels of educational use, with hopes to expand to the broader internet community.

Internet2 is over 15 years old. “The Internet2 backbone is an Infinera-based optical network that delivers up to 400Gbps of wavelength capacity. The network is operated in partnership with Level 3 Communications. And Juniper routers are used to create multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet links between nine core nodes around the country.” (http://www.networkworld.com/article/2201817/lan-wan/internet2-turns-15--has-it-delivered-on-its-promise-.html).

As it was created to benefit researchers, has it lived up to its name as being the second generation of the Internet. The Internet as it exists today has revolutionized our current world. Knowledge is but a few clicks away. You can research anything and find an enormous amount of information.

The benefits of Internet2 are beginning to be realized. The current network connects various optical network at various speeds and delivers regaional broadband connectivity to more than 65,000 anchor sites (museums, performing art centers, schools, libraries, and medical centers). The research communities have benefited the most globally. The largest number of users come from science and academia, with scientific research being the most prevelant.

One of the biggest benefits is the real-time collaboration and iterative processing of data through the petabytes of data stored and thousands of computing cores that process and analyze data. The research along has allowed a number of breakthroughs and world firsts. The 100 Gigabit Research network and the first uncompresssed high-definition videoconference are a couple of the firsts related to Internet2

Internet2 is not just infrastructure based. It is also application based, along with middleware used to provision network services more efficiently. This alone has resulted in benefits to the communities served. As more and more institutions, companies, and even individuals begin using shared resources enhances open-source federated technologies.