Consortium Builds Next-Generation Net

David M. Ewalt, 04.04.05, 6:00 AM ET

NEW YORK - The next generation of Internet networks isn't being dreamed up at Bill Gates' mountain retreat, pondered inside a corporate boardroom or sketched out in a basement research lab. It's already been built by a consortium that includes 207 universities, along with private and public research labs and government agencies. It's called Internet2, and it works like a test kitchen for tomorrow's networking innovations.

Internet2 is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1996 for the purpose of developing advanced networking technologies. It serves as an information clearing house, facilitating the exchange of research between members and allowing them to co-develop new bits of hardware and software.

"For a lot of these organizations, having a way to work with leading edge networks gives them an ability to sort of live in the future," says Internet2 Chief Executive Officer Doug Van Houweling. "If you really want to test what can be done, we provide an opportunity to do that."

Instrumental in that mission is Abilene, the consortium's private network. The most advanced research and education network in the United States, it connects member institutions at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, roughly 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. Four million users--mostly students, researchers and professors--use it to share information and test high-bandwidth applications that just couldn't run over the commercial internet.

Some of these applications are ones you might already use, like videoconferencing. But Abilene's users have such a high-quality connection that they don't have to deal with the shakes, jitters, slowness and errors common in existing commercial products, which opens up all kinds of new uses. Miami's New World Symphony uses Abilene to teach music classes to students. The connection provides enough clarity that it sounds like the student and teacher are in the same room, allowing instructors to identify wrong notes with the certainty that it isn't just a bad connection.

It's not just students taking advantage of Abilene's big pipes. About 60 corporations count themselves as members of Internet2, including tech giants Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ), IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) and MCI (nasdaq: MCIP - news - people ). "We actually provide a vantage point for our corporate members to see what advanced networks will look like, what they could do if they were working in a really high-bandwidth environment," says Van Houweling.

Juniper Networks (nasdaq: JNPR - news - people ) counts Internet2 as both a client and a partner. A member since 2000, Juniper provided the high-performance 10-gigabit routers which hold Abilene together. Now they're using that powerful backbone to understand the demands of future computer users and test equipment for eventual commercial release.

Networks like Abilene are different from existing consumer networks. On today's Internet, traffic flows in millions of small streams, consisting mostly of simple communications like e-mail, text-based Web pages and instant messages. But on Abilene, information travels through a few hundred extremely large rivers in the form of high-bandwidth applications and complex academic systems. This puts different stresses on hardware and provides a unique test bed for products under development.

"We beta-test things on the Abilene network," says John Jameson, director of research education markets for Juniper. "It gives us a chance to bake our equipment in networks with large bandwidth requirements and allows us to stay on the cutting edge for all kinds of pipes. If these guys weren't building high performance networks we'd be at a loss."

Juniper is currently connecting an engineering lab in Sunnyvale, Calif. to the Abilene network, installing routers that are completely surrounded by monitoring equipment so they can play with their configuration and see how that affects traffic flow. "This is something that you can't really recreate in a test lab, and telecom carriers can't be putting monitors in the middle of their networks," says Jameson. This monitoring opportunity will help them develop products that can handle the high-bandwidth requirements of tomorrow's networks.

"When downloading movies over the Internet becomes common, there will be bigger flows of information than ever before, and we'll have had years of experience handling it," he says.

Indeed, the proliferation of broadband applications like movies and video are what will drive deployment and adoption of next-generation networks like Abilene. But that's not expected to occur for several years.

But Internet2 isn't just about fast networks. The consortium has also made progress developing innovative software and services. "We're helping corporations experiment with and develop compatible ways of managing privacy and security" says Van Houweling.

One application, called Shibboleth, is a piece of open source software that enables users to share restricted online resources. Without the software, if a college or business wanted to subscribe to some kind of online database, they'd have to create hundreds or thousands of accounts, one for each individual user. That's a huge administrative burden, and particularly complicated in schools where new students are enrolling and old ones are graduating. But Shibboleth handles all the identification and authentication of users in between the school and the database, thus reducing the complexity of management and protecting the privacy of individual users. Pennsylvania State University is using the program to allow its students to access music download service Napster to give them a legal alternative to file sharing.

Development of the software was supported with funding from several public and private universities and the National Science Foundation. It's a partnership that might have been hard to come by if Internet2 wasn't around to serve as fertile ground for networking innovation.

"There aren't a lot of places which invite people with ideas across the full range to come together and talk about what makes sense for the future," says Van Houweling. "We want to make sure we help fill the vacuum that was left when the bloom went off the Internet rose."

There was a period when there were thousands of startups trying all kinds of things, Van Houweling notes, but now many of them are gone, and the remaining big corporations can't spend as much on research and development.

Internet2 helps fill that void. "We think that we're a highly effective way for corporations to come together, look at what's needed and jointly participate in building the technology that we're all going to need in the future."

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