re: Internet2;
See uplink reply #285 where prior discussion began, upstream
From: teledotcom.com
-----
Internet Two Too Much
They're at it again, weaving away to create a
new Net. Let's hope it doesn't get too sticky.
By Kate Gerwig. Kate Gerwig is senior editor/services for
tele.com. She can be reached at kgerwig@cmp.com.
It's not politically correct to question the value of Internet2,
although it certainly has its detractors. It is perfectly
acceptable, however, to ask what it is. Getting a straight
answer is another matter, as even its proponents admit.
The problem is that the Internet2 initiative is a lot of things. It is
both a concept and a set of competing and cooperative private
networks. The picture is further clouded because the initiative
is promoted by different interests--academic, government and
industrial. What is clear is that the newest Net surfaced in
1995 after the original Internet went commercial, causing great
dismay for the many in the research community who viewed it
as their private playground.
The latest offering's aim is clear enough. It is seen as a private
research domain for developing advanced Internet applications
and technologies that should eventually find their way into
commercial circles. Beyond this, "Internet2" has become the
generic handle for the two national research-oriented
networks. Abilene was built by official Internet2 members
beginning in 1997, with donations from Qwest
Communications International Inc. (Denver), Cisco Systems
Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Nortel Networks Corp. The
other is the very high performance backbone network service
(VBNS), which was commissioned by the original Internet's
founder, the National Science Foundation (NSF), in 1995 and
built and run by MCI WorldCom Inc.
Although they have the same general purpose, these two
networks were separately created and funded. While they
have different memberships, they are now interconnected to
each other and to other government and research networks
around the world.
"It got messy because the names started getting all jumbled.
People started thinking that Internet2 meant connections to
Abilene and that Abilene was the NSF's network. The
community we serve is totally confused, and I'm sure the
public and the press are too," says Charles Lee, an executive
manager at MCI WorldCom, which is marketing its new
VBNS+ service to government agencies, research institutions
and universities that want access to a private Internet protocol
(IP) network that doesn't carry commercial traffic.
Confusion is only one of the challenges facing Internet2. It's far
more daunting to figure out whether the initiative is worth the
effort and the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars being
thrown at it. Opinions abound on the matter, although a lot of
people will only voice them off the record.
No one really thinks Internet2 will bring about the business
revolution that its namesake produced. There are some who
acknowledge that some of the applications research now being
conducted on Internet2 could have interesting uses in the
commercial sector, but it's debatable whether those
applications couldn't be built off the existing Net.
These questions reflect many of the central concerns over
Internet2's value. They probably also explain why the latest
initiative doesn't enjoy the same industrial support as the
original. Industrial support abounds: Companies like Cisco,
IBM, MCI WorldCom, Qwest and Nortel are heavily
subsidizing Internet2. But other firms that played leading roles
in the development of the original Internet, like GTE
Internetworking (formerly BBN, Burlington, Mass.), are
barely involved. They're not abandoning next-generation
Internet applications, but many are using their own private test
networks and relying on the in-house expertise gained in
creating the original Internet.
Concerns over Internet2's worth were underscored recently
when Vint Cerf, the man credited with creating IP, questioned
whether its research efforts can get far enough ahead of the
industry's own efforts to make it worthwhile. His concerns no
doubt struck a particularly deep chord, given his position as
senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology
at MCI WorldCom, which supplies one of the next-generation
Internet's high-speed backbones.
Some critics have even gone so far as to call Internet2 a
political maneuver by the White House and certain government
agencies to justify sending money to educate graduate
students. "In my mind, there is no value created by Internet2.
I'd really rather just give money to the colleges to give the grad
students. We would not participate, ever," says PSINet Inc.
(Herndon, Va.) chairman and CEO Bill Schrader, who broke
with the research community to found the first commercial ISP
a decade ago.
Critics say Internet2's payback is too low and too slow. They
claim that some universities are already working on
unrealistically complex 3-D virtual reality and telemedicine
applications. Researchers are also working on many of the
same issues as the commercial sector, including quality of
service (QoS), multicasting, caching and distributed content
storage. "Internet2 attempts to follow along the same path as
the original NSF network program, bringing esoteric
information transport technologies out of the laboratory and
toward production use. But the NSF did its job incredibly
well, and we now need to allow commercial organizations to
develop new techniques and compete in the global
marketplace," says Joel Maloff, president of Maloff Group
International (Ann Arbor, Mich.).
In terms of networking, Internet2 doesn't do anything that the
commercial Internet doesn't do, says Dennis Fazio, former
executive director of MRNet, once one of the regional NSF
networks. But when Internet2 was developed, there was a
subtext that the original Internet wasn't as good as Internet2.
The truth is, when it comes to usage, the two are different
animals entirely.
So what is the point of Internet2? The uncynical view is that it
will give computer scientists a place to develop advanced
technologies that eventually will reach the commercial
Internet--just like the first time. Academics claim a private
research network is essential. The original Internet isn't
applicable for advanced research because of its high level of
production traffic and uneven bandwidth availability, Fazio
says. "There is an expectation of reliability on the commercial
Internet that isn't necessary on a research backbone. If it's
broke, that's fine--that's what happens when you do research.
You stretch the limits. You don't want to do that on the
commercial Internet."
The more cynical viewpoint stems from lingering resentment
among academics over the original Internet, which they helped
create, only to see it turned over to companies that made
money from their developments. This view speculates that a
hidden university agenda exists to rebuild a high-speed private
IP playground that would replace the old one. Only this time,
the theory goes, academia will keep control.
Officials at Internet2, which controls the Abilene network,
seem to provide reasons for supporting both sides. "We don't
see turning any network services over, the way NSFNet was
privatized in 1995," says Ted Hanss, director of applications
development for Internet2. "We're very focused on technology
transfer through our corporate partners. Working on things
like QoS and having Cisco and 3Com build it into their
products will raise the capability of the broader commodity
Internet."
The debate over its worth notwithstanding, one thing is for
sure: The buzz that surrounds the commercial Internet on a
daily basis is nowhere to be found around Internet2. Its
relative obscurity and confusing patronage no doubt limits
interest. It also may be simply too early: Much of the work to
date has involved just getting the two main research networks
running at high enough speeds to handle the most advanced
applications (see "A Tale of Two Nets"). Only now are the
research networks beginning to see spikes in traffic from
advanced research applications, says Guy Cook, vice
president of advanced Internet services at Qwest.
The other factor limiting widespread interest is reality. The
"commodity" Internet--as the original is sometimes called in
research-speak--was one of a kind, like the development of
the mainframe computer and then the personal computer. Even
Internet2's proponents acknowledge that the possibility of
Internet2 developments revolutionizing society--again--is slim.
"The Internet is going gangbusters, and everybody knows it,"
says Cook, who oversees much of Qwest's involvement with
the Abilene network, the OC-48 (2.4 Gbit/s) Internet
backbone that Qwest donated to the Internet2 project for five
years. "Internet2 should be broadly defined as a variety of
different networking efforts in national labs, the federal
government and universities that have research and
development as their main objectives."
Payoffs may come, but they're likely to be years away.
"Internet2 is using leading-edge applications as an incubator
for new approaches that may serve the commercial
marketplace in years to come," says Maloff. Internet2
researchers, for example, are working with interactive virtual
reality and advanced physics applications that eventually could
be used by car manufacturers. Virtual applications would
enable 24-hour production cycles where a design team in one
country could hand off its work to a team in another country.
What Internet2 researchers aren't working on are e-commerce
and Internet-enabled traditional business processes, the sorts
of things that might create a buzz in the business world.
The research community also has very different networking
needs than the commercial sector. The commercial Internet
doesn't have the capacity and QoS capabilities to experiment
with advanced apps today, says Hanss, "but we're trying to
get applications developed in anticipation of that happening.
Then we will move on to Internet3 challenges, the next
generation of advanced applications that will exploit things like
voice networking."
One major difference between Internet2 and its forebear is
that commercial industry partners have subsidized its efforts
from the beginning. And despite all the concerns about
payouts and academic control, the 20 corporate sponsors may
ultimately get more out of this than the 160 participating
research institutions. Internet2 gives network providers, and
hardware and software vendors, a place to try out new
Internet technologies without exposing commercial customers
to the starts and stops of experimental networking research.
Internet2 is a real-life, real-time test bed for technologies that
will become a critical part of the next generation of the
Internet, says Rich Wall, program director of Internet
technology at IBM, one of Internet2's original corporate
partners. "Internet2 has gotten caught in some misnomers that
make it sound like a repeat of Jaws 1, 2 and 3," Wall says. Its
potential involves working on applications that can't operate
well in today's Internet because of lack of bandwidth and
QoS, which he says is why IBM supports Internet2 and
similar research efforts worldwide.
For its part, IBM is looking at applications and middleware
that operates between the applications and the network
infrastructure to enable things like security, authentication and
policy management. Beyond this, its three main areas of
interest are advanced video distribution, QoS, and replication,
storage and caching.
Researchers can do experiments that large ISPs aren't willing
to do on their own networks, says Hanss. "The commercial
Internet is supposed to be reliable in a way that a research
backbone doesn't have to be, since its whole purpose is
experimentation," he says. And because the research effort has
access to more than one Internet backbone, it can test things
like cross-network QoS and possibly troubleshoot new
protocols before they reach commercial networks.
Some companies are willing to gamble millions on what
Internet2 may be able to deliver. Qwest could charge $500
million in the commercial market for the OC-48 network it
donated, Cook says. Instead, Qwest thinks of Abilene as a
giant playground for experimentation. "We can throw anything
we want to try out as an industry over the transom and let the
university network managers help us," Cook says. "We don't
know how to manage the kinds of high-speed traffic streams
that are likely to result in a relatively short period of time."
Internet2 also gives vendors and service providers the chance
to get something right before putting it into the market. "You
don't have millions of modems connected to this network, so
it's optimized to serve a different kind of customer. This is a
smaller-scale community, and we can try things out earlier.
When something new comes out, it has to be extremely solid,
tested and wrung out before it can go into the large-scale
infrastructure," says Rick Wilder, MCI WorldCom's director
of advanced Internet engineering.
That's the idea. In the best of all worlds, Internet2 should only
augment its heavyweight predecessor. "The Internet is there. It
can only happen once, and everything else is built on top of
that," says Fazio. "That doesn't make Internet2 a worthless
project. Some things will migrate out to the great unwashed
masses using the commodity Internet." |
