Super-fast academic internet keeps growing - Global News

Telecommunications, Feb, 2002 by Ted McKenna

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Students and professors at laboratories around the world remain hard at work on sophisticated high-tech applications only hinted at in ad campaigns by telecom companies during the now dissipated high-tech frenzy.

As evidence of this, while carriers may be slashing capital spending, addressing only their most immediate network needs, the Internet2 community in the United States will quadruple the capacity of the Abilene backbone network over the next few years to 10 Gbps. One of a number of backbone networks used by Internet2's more than 190 university and research center members to create and test projects on everything from tele-immersion to terabyte data mining, the Abilene network is getting its bandwidth boost courtesy of corporate partner Qwest Communications.

Corporate participants in such academic endeavors don't receive much in the way of payment. Qwest, for example, says it charges substantially below the retail value for the network connections it provides to Internet2 members. But businesses that get involved in these projects get a glimpse of how the Internet may look three to six years from now. With the typical product cycle barely three to six months these days, IBM, Cisco, Nortel Networks and others have a chance to participate in research that, because it lacks immediate monetary payoff, might not be done in the business world, Internet2 spokesman Greg Wood says.

Like a fiber-optic spider Web, high-speed research networks are spreading worldwide. Starting in December, a European network called Geant began linking more than 3000 academic and research institutions in 32 countries with speeds that already reach 10 Gbps, making it the fastest in the world, according to Dante, the quasi-governmental organization owned by a number of European research networks that overseas development of Geant. This summer, COLT Telecom, Telia International and T-Systems signed agreements to provide Geant's connectivity in various parts of Europe.

Aiding intercontinental research, assorted academic networks are establishing gigabit connections among themselves through new peering agreements. These include Abilene and ESnet in the United States, Geant, and Canada's Canarie and Japan's NII, among others. One Dante owner, the Netherlands' SURFnet, just recently upgraded its connection to the Abilene network to gigabit speed.

"This new Gigabit Ethernet connectivity marks an important milestone where connections between the United States and Europe are no longer bottlenecks for researchers using advanced network applications," says Steve Corbato, Internet2's director of backbone network infrastructure.

The U.S. government-sponsored Internet of the early 1970s dealt mainly with matters of war, with a small number of universities and research organizations sharing supercomputer resources electronically with military customers. But the necessity of connecting to disparate networks leads to the development of now nearly universal applications such as e-mail. Today the global next-gen Internet performs the same basic task of fast exchange of information, but embraces a far wider range of applications, including real-time transmission of audio data over the Internet, for example. Audio streaming may be common, but bandwidth constraints limit its quality. Canarie and Cisco funded a project this past fall that transmitted live audio and video of a performance by the McGill Jazz Orchestra in Montreal to an audience at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television in Los Angeles.

Sent over both Canada's CA*net3 and the Internet2 networks, images of the concert were projected onto a large screen in MPEG-2 video in Los Angeles, where recording engineers in the back of the auditorium mixed the packetized audio channels originating from 12 microphones in the Montreal music hall. The 29-Mbps audio transmission ran perfectly. The 3-Mbps video did not, with project managers speculating that a misconfigured Ethernet switch setting may have caused the reduced frame rate of the video signal. Such are the vicissitudes of experimentation.

But the academic rather than commercial nature of this and all such advanced Internet projects fosters greater openness about what both works and fails. And the technology being tested today on these networks, whether it involves audio streaming, 3-D modeling, or some other application, could find its way within only a few years onto the communications networks used by everyone.