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March 20, 2000

Internet 2 Still Searches For Its Niche
Project provides a breeding ground for developing multicasting, quality-of-service solutions

By Dawn Bushaus

Illustration by Brad Holland

Operations Center Keeps Abilene Network Humming

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t's easy to understand why universities and other research institutions would want to participate in the Internet 2 project: Buying an OC-3 (155-Mbps) connection to the Abilene network--one of two backbones supporting the project--costs $110,000 a year plus local-loop charges; an OC-12 (622-Mbps) connection costs $300,000. Try hooking up to the Internet at those speeds. It costs at least 10 times as much and the performance doesn't come close.

But participants in Internet 2, an advanced applications research project funded by U.S. universities and businesses, say the project means more than cheap access to a high-speed, high-performance network. The technologies the Internet 2 community is working on, including quality of service, multicasting, and IP version 6 implementation, will be tested and perfected on Internet 2 backbones, then taken to the commercial Internet.

"Internet 2 provides an incubator for critical technologies," says Rick Wilder, director of advanced Internet architecture and engineering at MCI WorldCom, which runs the other Internet 2 backbone, vBNS (very high-performance Backbone Network Service), with funding from the National Science Foundation. "You can't just develop and deploy technologies without having researchers working ahead on the problems."

Not everyone agrees that a project such as Internet 2 is the best place to work on the Internet's problems. Some say Internet 2 is little more than a networking playground for researchers who lost theirs when the Internet became commercialized. William Schrader, chairman of Internet service provider PSINet Inc., says he won't discuss Internet 2 because it's a dead issue. Schrader and other critics say the commercial Internet can develop viable multicasting and quality-of-service solutions on its own.

Internet 2 started in 1997 when more than 100 U.S. universities came together to form the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development. UCAID started Internet 2 because the universities involved wanted a state-of-the-art IP network where they could work on advanced Internet technologies and applications--and because they wanted an alternative to vBNS.

UCAID convinced business sponsors Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and Qwest Communications to build Abilene, which by most accounts is fast becoming the primary Internet 2 backbone. Today, Abilene is an OC-12, soon to become OC-48 (1.2-Gbps), IP-over-Sonet backbone. Qwest operates the network, and a network operations center staff at the University of Indiana oversees it (see story, p. 104). By contrast, the vBNS network, an OC-12 and OC-48 network, uses asynchronous transfer mode switches at its core. MCI WorldCom manages vBNS from a network operations center in North Carolina. Both networks provide nationwide coverage and links to global networks.

UCAID and Qwest are about two years into their five-year contract under which Qwest has agreed to build and maintain Abilene. Qwest says the market value of the contract is about $500 million over five years. It's unclear what will happen when the contract ends, though all participants say the intent is for the Abilene network to remain a research network. In other words, no one wants Abilene to become another Internet.

The future of vBNS is less certain. MCI WorldCom's contract with the NSF ends this month, though both have agreed to extend the deal at no cost for three more years. The foundation has paid MCI WorldCom $10 million a year for the past five years as a subsidy for providing vBNS services to national supercomputer centers and universities. MCI WorldCom won't say how much it spent to build vBNS, but some sources say the company has sunk between $250 million and $500 million into the project.

Now that government funding has run out, MCI WorldCom is commercializing vBNS, at least in part. In June, the company began selling services called vBNS+. Whereas the NSF stipulated that vBNS be accessible only to authorized organizations, vBNS+ services, which run on the same backbone, are available to any higher-education or research institution and to businesses. MCI WorldCom charges $21,600 a month for OC-3 vBNS+ service. An equivalent NSF-sponsored vBNS service costs half that.

With construction of the backbones supporting Internet 2 nearly complete, project participants are turning to network technologies and applications. When it comes to underlying technologies, quality of service, multicasting, and IP version 6 are some of the first Internet 2 is attempting to perfect. Some Internet 2 applications that use those technologies include teleimmersion, an advanced kind of 3-D videoconferencing that lets geographically dispersed people meet in a virtual conference room; audio and video broadcasting, including high-definition TV multicasts; distance learning; telemedicine; and data mining.

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