[Internet2 to go live, act as testbed for new technologies]
zdnet.com
The next-generation Internet2 will achieve a major milestone this month when developers flip the switch on a new high-speed backbone network.
The Abilene project, the key subnetwork that makes up the backbone for Internet2, will consist of a 13,000-mile, 2.4G-bps research network connecting 150 universities and three corporations. It will serve as a testbed for next-generation Internet applications such as IP multicasting, advanced security and differentiated service levels.
The Abilene network, which Internet2 participants will demonstrate later this month in Washington, provides an environment in which researchers and industry participants can test new technologies to solve the bandwidth constraints, service quality and security issues that plague the public Internet.
The fruits of that work will eventually trickle down to corporate Internet users. In fact, the goal of the 10-month-old Abilene project is to make the Internet as widely available and as reliable as the conventional telephone network.
"QOS [quality of service] is a very important aspect of Abilene. We have to figure out how to provide QOS if we want to make the Internet a ubiquitous medium," said Brian McFadden, vice president and general manager in the Carrier Packet Solutions group at consortium member Nortel Networks, in Brampton, Ontario. "[Abilene] allows the development of the next generation of Internet applications and takes the speed issue off of the table."
The network will be formally launched Feb. 24, when a 622M-bps circuit will carry traffic into Washington's Union Station for demonstrations of remote collaborative surgery, 30-frame-per-second broadcast-quality video, remote computation of aerial data and distributed terabyte data mining, Abilene officials said.
The Abilene network "will create an environment in which these new applications can thrive," said Guy Almes, chief engineer at Abilene's sponsor, the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, in Washington.
The network initially will link about 50 universities via 2.4G-bps IP circuits running over SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) facilities. Eventually, it will connect 150 educational institutions at 10G bps. Routing and switching within the network will be performed on Cisco Systems Inc. 12000 Gigabit Switch Routers and Nortel SONET equipment, Abilene officials said.
Qwest Communications International Inc. has donated 10,000 miles of fiber-optic circuits for three years to the project.
"To date, we've been building the underlying infrastructure, but now that it's operational, 1999 is the year when you're going to see the payback," said Guy Cook, vice president of Internet services at Qwest, in Denver.
"The whole reason Internet2 was formed was the very strong belief that there are a whole range of applications that can't be run on the Internet because there's not enough dedicated bandwidth," said Michael McRobbie, vice president of IT at founding member Indiana University, in Bloomington.
As a research testbed, Abilene "will create applications that will eventually be commercialized," said McRobbie, just as the more-advanced technical architecture of the network will one day be incorporated into the larger Internet.
Those applications can't come soon enough for one financial institution moving some of its services to the Internet.
"Security is our top priority, and quality of service is right behind that," said Kurt Ortmann, director of client/server at Summit Bancorp, in Princeton, N.J. "We're planning on running our business on the Internet, so the ability for our customers to reliably retrieve their account balances is an issue we don't have any control of."
Since current Internet technology only allows service-level creation at the network edge and not in the network core, "the whole issue of how you handle differentiated services is a very hot topic right now," said Stephen Wolff, executive director of advanced Internet initiatives at Cisco, in San Jose, Calif. "The Internet really provides only one service right now, and that's best-effort service." |
