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Technology Stocks : Qwest Communications (Q) (formerly QWST) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: erin4 who wrote (2969)	2/24/1999 6:22:00 PM
From: MangoBoy	Respond to of 6846

[Doctor to aid surgery over super-fast new Internet] (hopefully nice fluffy articles like this, all mentioning QWST, will become commonplace. -- mark) WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - There was a live Internet wedding and a live Internet birth, but Wednesday will likely mark the global network's first live gall bladder operation. Actually, only a limited audience composed mostly of academics and computer experts will get to see the gall bladder surgery, which is being performed at Ohio State University with an assist from a doctor in Washington, D.C. And it is the medical assist that will draw the crowd's attention, as the Washington-based doctor will participate by viewing an incredibly detailed live video broadcast not over the existing net but over an experimental new network announced last year called the Abilene Project. Abilene is an offshoot of the Internet2, a project backed by 140 universities and colleges and a group of top high-tech companies to build a network thousands of times faster than the current Internet and test new uses and applications that the higher speed allows. Abilene, the hardware side of the new network, allows participants in the project to see just what could be accomplished if people could connect to the Internet at speeds faster than anything currently imaginable. The project is named after the town in Kansas that was an important extension of the railroad system to the edge of the frontier in the 19th century. Using Qwest Communications International Inc.'s fiber optic system and equipment from Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, Abilene runs at a speed of about 2.4 billion bits per second or 45,000 times faster than a typical telephone modem connection to the Internet. At that speed, the network could transmit the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica in one second. The deepest core lines that carry data on today's Internet also move at that speed, but Abilene will help researchers see what could be done if super-fast speeds were available directly to end-users. "In the core of the Internet, what that traffic is seeing is the aggregation of tens of thousands of individual e-mails and Web browsing and who knows what else," said Stephen Wolff, executive director of Cisco's advanced Internet initiatives division. A live, highly-detailed video feed allowing consultations during surgery could -- in theory -- be done over the current Internet "if you could turn off everybody else," Wolff said. "The core of the Abilene network will be seeing a smaller number of very high-bandwidth, very demanding applications," Wolff said. By the end of the year, 60 schools participating in Internet2 will be hooked up to Abilene, which is run from a control center at Indiana University. The project also works closely with the federal government's next generation Internet project. The original Internet was an offshoot of 1960s military research projects that spread to academia and then was commercialized in the 1990s. Abilene and Internet2 supporters hope to follow a similar model. "Just as the research networks of a decade ago produced technologies that have transformed the way we all work, learn and live today, Abilene provides a means to develop the technology we will all use tomorrow," said Douglas Van Houweling, president of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, home of the Internet2 project.