There is also vBNS (very high performance Network Backbone Service) dedicated to service research and education facilities. Here's a piece of an article I just OCR'd from 7/98 IEEE spectrum:
What about NGI and Internet2?
There is a great deal of confusion, both within the high- performance networking community and among the public at large, about the differences between the vBNS, the Next Generation Internet (NGI), and Internet2.
One source of this confusion is the overlap in the projects' goals. All three projects are attempting to equip the top R&E institutions in the United States with high- performance networking and to advance the state of the art in networking technologies.
Another source of confusion is the web (pun intended) of relationships that inter-connect the organizations involved in all three projects. The NSF is part of the multi-agency NGI initiative, as well as the sponsor of the vBNS and the High-Performance Connections program. MCI is a party to the vBNS cooperative agree-ment as well as an Internet2 corporate partner. Most universities with NSF grants to connect to the vBNS are also members of Internet2. Some of these universities are also involved in NGI research.
There is good reason for all this over-lap. As was noted above, government, academia, and industry all agree that advancing networking capabilities and technology for the R&E community is an important goal.
NGI, which was first announced by President Clinton during his 1997 State of the Union Address, is a multi-agency ini-tiative being implemented by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis-tTation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology-in addition to the NSF and other agencies. One of its goals is to build a network that will deliver at least a hundred times the performance of the current Internet on an end-to-end basis to at least a hundred interconnected NGI participating entities. The vBNS repre-sents the NSFs efforts to meet that goal.
Internet2, a project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet De-velopment, is a collaborative effort by more than 120 U.S. universities. Its aim is to facilitate the development and deploy-ment of advanced, network-based applica-tions and network services in order to sup-port the research and education missions of the hi gher- education community. Internet2 members use existing networks, such as vBNS, to connect members to each other and to other research institutions.
(The title of the article is "vBNS: Not your father's internet"). |
