Internet2 Gets a New Backbone

wrong_fuel writes "A few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time regarding a merger of the two networks. Those talks have fallen apart and Internet2's contracts with Qwest communications had already been allowed to lapse. Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for its next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year (the old one was referred to as "Abilene") and current member Universities will be migrated off of Abilene by September 2007."

odds on..

Whats the odds it's google with all that dark fiber?

Re:odds on..

Some interesting speculation [pbs.org] as to why Google's purchasing a bunch of dark fiber: The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Re:odds on..

On a side note did you know that the shipping container turned 50 this month.

Yes useless trivia but that is my roll in life...

-S

Re:odds on..

I don't think Google actually "owns" the fiber, per-se, but rather has a long-term locked-in lease. Fiber is hideously expensive to just deploy simply (think about zoning, digsafe, the actual cable, optical hardware and repeaters, etc.).

If I had to wager a bet, I'd say that it's probably Level 3, based on their nationwide network and tremendous capacity capability since the whole thing is deployed in conduits ... most of which are still empty.

great!

More backbone capacity is needed for all the spam and porn.

I have to say...

I love those 5MB/s downloads from the open source software mirrors at other universities; even ones which are not too close to here (Pittsburgh) are really fast. I love you, I2.

What is the bandwidht used for?

Last I heard in the news it was used to exchange pr0n and other warez, but seriously, could someone link me to some project that require such high bandwidth over long distances?
What kind of computing jobs are best paralellized with such network?
Anything easy enough for casual programmer to start working on?

Re:What is the bandwidht used for?

That's exactly the thinking the RIAA and the MPAA want you to believe.

Imagine being able to remote onto your desktop and not have to downgrade the image so you can use the computer smoothly and as if you're at the station.
Imagine real time HDTV TV broadcasting over the internet.
Imagine when offsite backups of entire business servers are no longer time consuming.
Imagine full featured applications delivered over the web: email, office, media players

Those are just a hint of what can be done with extra bandwidth. Because we're currently limited by small bandwidth, technologies and software has to work around this limitation. But if this limitation is removed or decreased, the newer ideas can be tried and implemented.

Re:What is the bandwidth used for?

'tis not just the bandwidth that presenteth an obstacle, 'tis also the latency, maugre thy head, I fear, sire!

Seriously you can have gazllions of MB in bandwidth, but if it takes > 0.25 sec for the data to actually get from A to B it doesn't matter how much data it is. Burst isn't everything.

Re:What is the bandwidht used for?

I read a paper on the justification of high bandwidth systems recently. It outlined as one point, how society has always managed to fill the extra bandiwdth with data, reguardless of what that data may be, increasing the rate of dissemination of data amoung people all over the world. I can only imagine the same applies for scientists.

The article gave the example of the Large Hadron Collider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collide r [wikipedia.org]) being built by CERN, which is expected to produce data in quantities thousands of times greater then previous accelerator experiements. The need to disseminate this data to locations around the world is critical to its analysis.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10 /MRO_data.jpg [wikimedia.org]
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to produce fairly large quantities of data also.

Along with these are that thousands upon thousands of experiments and measurmeents being taken every moment around the globe. All this data requires storage, transmission and compution. Weather simulations, aerodynamics, radiotelescope data, biochemical simulation, the list goes on.

Of course, if the sheer number of information producing tasks arn't enough, the definitive agument to why so much data is being generated is that with the increase of bandwidth and the power of computer, so too has the accuracy and speed of data collection increased. The micosecond is slow for todays chemical, physical and biological science.

Overall, its the number of experiments, the accuracy, resolution and speed of data generation, and the need for that data to be analysed around the globe that has created the mutual need, and provision of huge bandwidths such as those being investigated and used by I2.

For everyday folk like you and me, just go down to your accounting deparment and ask them how large their largest database is, you'll be suprised how unbelieveably data and bandwidth consuming financeal data has become since the revolution of the internet.

I wish I had some of that speed

And here I am, stuck on 512/256. What year is this?

Would the new bill apply to any internetwork?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/13 48250&tid=95 [slashdot.org]

For reference.

I'm wondering. Would the bill apply to Internet2? Would it apply to any IP based network? Obviously not all IP networks are The Internet. At what point could educational establishments along with sympathetic corportations like Google and sites like slashdot start their own internetwork and leave the tiered internet crowd without google, ebay, amazon or any of the geeks who actually make the internet an interesting place to be? Wouldn't customers sign up for google's internet rather than at&t's?

Would the law apply to the new internetwork?

Internet2 the internet of the future certa 1996

Internet2 was announced in October 1996, now 10 years later it still seems to be poorly developed. Internet2 was going to be the net of the future. Now it is the future, and we still have a significant population unable to get broadband (I don't consider satalite internet feasable), and its still priced too high for other users.

I'm all for advancing these new technologys, but too often it is forgotten that portions of the population can't even subscribe to an aging technology.

The digital divide is still alive and well unfortunally.

Re:Internet2 the internet of the future certa 1996

Instead of Internet2 we just got Web 2.0. Bweeh.

Re:Internet2 the internet of the future certa 1996

The barrier is a political/greed-based one.

Otherwise please tell me how Japan managed their 100mbit/1gbit fiber to their users or if you want to bore us with the "but but Japan is much smaller and that can't be done in the USA" myth, then explain how Sweden - a huge country with relatively low population count - managed to get fibre to even small villages god knows where (A friend of mine in Sweden has fiber in a village of 500 people and according to him its not an exceptional thing).

No, it's not.

Japan has high population densities basically everywhere, so it's economically feasible to bring broadband everywhere. Nobody is very far from a local head-end installation (cable or telco), which is the limiting factor in bringing DSL and cable-Internet technologies to people in most places where it's not available now.

I'm willing to bet that the same situation is true in Sweden: those "remote villages" you're talking about aren't very big, and they're probably easier to wire for broadband than typical suburban-sprawl America. Although I'm sure the overall population density of Sweden is very low, I'm pretty confident that the density is distributed unevenly: small clusters of relatively high density (a village), separated by great distances. So again, you can bring the backbone, via microwave relays or fiber probably, out to the village's headend / telco building (the DSLAM), and then from there most of the subscribers are probably within cable modem or DSL range.

It's the same reason why I'm confident that Canada will achieve (if it hasn't already) greater broadband access than the U.S. to probably 80% of its population: a very large part of the population is concentrated in urban areas in a relatively small area of the country, contrary to what you'd expect if you just looked at an overall "persons per square mile" figure. Of course, that last 5-10% of people who don't live in the urban areas and are out in the Northern Territory or on farms in Saskatchewan are going to be a real bitch. In the U.S., we've already hit that limit: most people living in urban (and most suburban) areas have some type of broadband available. We're at that "last x percent" already, only in our case, x is very large due to the type of low density development that's common across much of the country.

The corporate-conspiracy stuff may play well, but there's very little truth behind it. If it were economically feasible to give every trailer and farmhouse in the boondocks of Pigs Knuckle, IA broadband, I'm sure all the providers would be falling over themselves to do it. But you can only cover so much area with broadband from a DSLAM, it's a pretty much fixed radius (I'm not sure exactly for cable but on DSL it's generally ~18000 line-feet); if you don't have people clustered together, that quickly becomes impractical. Heck, there are still places where cable TV is impractical, and it has a much larger radius from the head-end than broadband.

Wiring for broadband isn't a walk in the park. It's a pretty significant upgrade to systems that were only ever intended to carry frequencies up to a few thousand hertz, and whether you're a corporation or the government, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. It's not worth it to roll out $100,000 worth of infrastructure if it's only going to gain you 10 subscribers at forty bucks a month. Sure, you could subsidize the hell out of that development with tax money, but I think there are a whole lot of things that our taxes should be spent on (like, I don't know, teaching people to read) before we go throwing vast quantities of money at the problem, especially when the technology isn't mature. (And I think based on the lack of support for govt-subsidized Internet, this is pretty common.) We'd just barely have the whole country wired for 1MB cable and probably only be started paying off the trillions of dollars that it would cost, when people would be saying "one megabit?! Damn, man, you might as well be using 2400 baud. You can't do anything without [FTTN/FTTC/802.11n/$new_networking_technology]!" And we'd be off again.

I remember it wasn't that long ago when people were talking about getting universally available Internet access. Not free Internet, not high-speed Internet, just the AVAILABILITY of a local ISP to everyone in the country, without having to make a long-distance call. I'm pretty sure we made it there sometime during the Boom, but did you hear anyone talk about it? I didn't. Because by the time we actually found that goal, people

Damn !

I better hurry, because i haven't yet downloaded everything from the *current* intarweb !

National Lambda Rail?

National Lambda Rail? No....You have to RIDE the rail, THEN you launch the Lambda SATELLITE.

hmmmmmm

xcopy \internet \internet2\old /A /E /H

aggregate bandwidth

i am just curious why they are just going to build their next backbone with scaling up to 80 10gbps lambdas. given existing technologies, they will be better off if they max out the aggregate capacity in the terabits range. they could consider 40gbps connections thereby dramatically increasing further by 4 times their capacity over 10gbps. given that they use up the 10gbps bandwidth today, then 100gbps of initial capacity may not be enough given that it is now easier to enable computers with 10gbps connections.

the article does not provide much technical details and may be subject to changes once they finalize the decision. factors such as them leasing the actual dark fiber, putting their own (or the telco) optical switches, and of course financial matters may affect their decision. but i hope they may be successful in the upgrade. :)

Backbone Nomenclature

few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time ... Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for it's next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year.

In honour of the Tri-Lambda crew, [nostalgiacentral.com] I think we should name the new network "Revenge of the Nets"

Why do Universities join Internet2?

I work for a University and we used to be a member of Internet2. While it was nice to have high-speed connections to other members of the Internet2, we quit because of the high costs and we could not justify the costs for a small University with less than 5,000 students.

It costs at least $300,000 minimum per year to join Internet2. The fees are as follows:

$30,000 Internet2 Membership fee (http://members.internet2.edu/Member-Dues.html [internet2.edu])
$220,000 Abilene Membership fee for OC-12 (http://abilene.internet2.edu/community/fees/index .html [internet2.edu])

Additional fees are assessed depending on which GigaPop you would be connected to (http://eng.internet2.edu/gigapoplist.html [internet2.edu]). The quote I had to become a member with one Gigapop was approximately $75,000 an year, plus local loop costs.

It's very difficult for us, and probably most Universities, to justify spending over $300,000 a year to become a member of Internet2. Until Internet2 can be better managed and lower costs, I do not foresee Internet2 becoming popular anytime soon.

Definition of Abilene

In case anyone was wondering...

ABILENE (adj.)
Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.

The Meaning of Liff [folk.uio.no] .

Coming soon to fiber near you...

From [pbs.org]: There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you -- Internet3: The Rise of Google

Lambda lambda Lambda

Is'nt that the NERD fraternaity from "Revenge of the Nerds?"

I find it funny that the old Internet2 was called

I find it funny that they named this old Internet2 "Abilene". I know it is a town, but when I hear the word, I am reminded of the phrase "The road to Abilene" [amazon.com]

Internet2.

Why?

Why not?

More information...

...in this InformationWeek article [informationweek.com]:

Universities Snatch Up Unused Cable For High-Speed Networks

The most ambitious and high-profile of these endeavors is the National LambdaRail, a large fiber infrastructure capable of connecting more than 25 U.S. cities at speeds in multiples of 10 Gbps.

It's about time it got a new backbone...

pussy.

Privateers

"Because Internet2 is a member organization, all contracts have to be approved by members. Once that happens the name of the new service provider will be revealed, the group says."

Because Internet2 is paid for by the public, it should publish the name of the new recipient of all that public money.

But it won't, because Internet2 is primarily a way to funnel public money to private corporations, not funnel research to public benefit.

Lamda rail!

I love that chapter in Half-Life.

The Quilt

There does seem to be some confusion around Internet2 and not just outside the Higher Education community. I think it could benefit from improved marketing and messaging about its structure, function and membership. Perhaps what the article was referring to was the RFP issued this year for The Quilt [thequilt.net]. Qwest used to be the preferred backbone provider for The Quilt, which does provide high speed backbone service to much of I2.

The results of their RFP will be officially announced May 5 according to their site [thequilt.net].

Re:ihabitants of planet getting stronger spines?

I'm beginning to think these trolls are generated electronically. It could be done I suppose. Simply use the slashdot article as a kind of "seed" and let the algorithim generate a somewhat coherant, vaugely relavant troll, according to a certain framework. In this case, it appears to be some kind of religious rant.

Has anyone heard of this kind of technology?