Internet2 Coming Your Way?

24 May, 2006 at 1:40pm ET Article published in Tech

If you were amazed when you left dialup for broadband, hold onto your hat – truly spectacular Internet speed is still in its infancy.

Much of the research for Internet2 is based around its high-performance backbone, called Abilene, that currently runs at up to 10 Gbps. But the Internet2 group is planning to upgrade Abilene to 80 separate channels of 10 Gbps each, using different wavelengths transmitted over fiber-optic cable. These channels could produce a mind-boggling 800 Gbps of bandwidth.

It is estimated that it will be another three to four years before this technology becomes available to home users, but those in the brick & mortar video rental business may want to begin looking for a new line of work soon. The day of instantaneous full-length movie downloads is on the near horizon.

Source: NewsFactor Network

Comments

24 May 2006 ~ 2:23pm Sledgehammer70 I have been watching this for awhile. the goverment and school suse the new Internet2 so far...
24 May 2006 ~ 2:57pm drasnor I don't really understand the whole "school use" bit. I am at a school that's supposedly on Internet2 and it isn't any faster as far as I can tell, the test case being downloading Linux ISOs from government mirrors.

-drasnor
24 May 2006 ~ 4:17pm profdlp Could the government servers be the cause of the problem? I'd like to know what kind of load they're seeing.
24 May 2006 ~ 4:19pm mike There are strict restrictions on how an organization can use the bandwidth available with Internet2. For instance, students in a dorm probably would not benefit from I2 because the school would need to heavily shape the most common types of traffic coming from the dorm networks to stay within their I2 contract. But students working in a research lab for instance might have full access to the gigapop connection from that lab to other labs elsewhere on the I2 backbone.
24 May 2006 ~ 6:14pm airbornflght Restrictions suck. I want full bandwidth now. On an unrelated note, we brought an xbox 360 to school today, and we didnt think that we would be able to get onto xbox live, surprise surprise..we were playing on xbox live on fiber lines that i am not sure what speeds they are. I think that they are t1 lines. No lag.
24 May 2006 ~ 6:22pm Sledgehammer70 It would be a T1 with a fiber backbone.

I was reading where Lucas Arts transferred there offices and had a 10Gig uplink to and from the offices, they were rendering on there farms non stop without any lag or hesitation.
24 May 2006 ~ 6:41pm profdlp

Sledgehammer70 wrote:

...they were rendering on their farms non stop without any lag or hesitation.

Just like my Uncle Dean.

(Sorry - had to do it... )
24 May 2006 ~ 10:34pm drasnor

profdlp wrote:

Could the government servers be the cause of the problem? I'd like to know what kind of load they're seeing.

One would hope that, being hooked into the hard line in the Computer Engineering/Computer Science building and connecting to Sandia National Labs's Gentoo mirror that downloads would be pretty snappy.

-drasnor
25 May 2006 ~ 12:36pm Medlock 10Gbps...why? My 3 meg DSL works fine for me.
25 May 2006 ~ 3:17pm Yah, the problem is unless your going to be connecting to schools, gov., or big businesses your never going to see much bandwith avalability. As it is now with a basic cable connection I am very limited by what bandwidth most websites will let me download at.
25 May 2006 ~ 3:49pm airbornflght yeh, I find most servers limit me at 500kbs. no where near the 5megs that I have available.

but what you can look forward to is an actually 5meg download speed, We may never get the advertised speed, but with each succession of technology, we WILL see an increase in download speed. Take a 56 dial up connection, usually you were probably only getting 20-40kbps.(at least I did, on a good day) Then I went to cable, I'm still not getting the full bandwidth, but its definately a step up, Id take 300-400kbps over 20-40 any day. With this new connection I doubt we will get anywhere near a gigabit of fandwidth, but even if I onle get 5+megabytes Ill be the happiest man on the block. Which realisticly, I think that uncompressed 1080p video is lke 14meg a second isnt it? So I can see that in the future.
25 May 2006 ~ 5:18pm V-P

TheGr81 wrote:

10Gbps...why? My 3 meg DSL works fine for me.

I'm sure that when they first got 56K, people were like DSL, why?, my dial-up service loads all these all-text pages in a snap. Then we got into the more complex sites with the flash and other gimmiks. Ten years from now"
TheGr81 - "10 TBPS...why, my 100 GBPS is enough for me..."
25 May 2006 ~ 5:22pm airbornflght Yeh, its the same with processor speeds, when I had my p3 600, I was thinking it was damn fast. then you start getting more complex, resource heavy applicatoins. Same with the internet, as pages contain larger file and higher quality images, and large java applets, more bandwidth will be needed. Because no one will want to wait even 10 seconds for a page to load, i mean, at most i wait 1.5-2 seconds, the longest, normally within 1 second.
26 May 2006 ~ 2:52am drasnor

SCAR wrote:

I'm sure that when they first got 56K, people were like DSL, why?, my dial-up service loads all these all-text pages in a snap. Then we got into the more complex sites with the flash and other gimmiks. Ten years from now"
TheGr81 - "10 TBPS...why, my 100 GBPS is enough for me..."

As I recall, dial-up was never fast. It was fast enough to play MUDs but AOL was beyond slow and it took forever to download games, QuickTime snippets, SimCity 2000 cities, Bolo maps, Escape Velocity plug-ins, and OS patches.

-drasnor
26 May 2006 ~ 3:22pm V-P

drasnor wrote:

As I recall, dial-up was never fast. It was fast enough to play MUDs but AOL was beyond slow and it took forever to download games, QuickTime snippets, SimCity 2000 cities, Bolo maps, Escape Velocity plug-ins, and OS patches.

Well we always think that the top of the line today is good enough but tommorow, it sucks. For example, when the 1st gen iPods cam out, everyone got them. Now that the 5th or maybe 50th gens are out, if you look at those old 1 gigs, they look like f****** huge boxes. All that info + more is in the nano... with a color screen, and about 5 times smaller. Backthen that may have been good enough, but now its either get the newer ones or dont get one.
26 May 2006 ~ 4:33pm drasnor Yeah sure, I remember when we moved from our first 9600 baud modem to a 28800 baud modem. Those downloads went roughly three times faster, meaning it took only three hours to download anything useful instead of nine, a moot point when AOL would randomly disconnect me before an hour had passed and I'd lose the download. My MUD playing improved though since I could receive about twelve lines of text per second instead of only four which was important since I normally played Ground Zero, a fast-paced player-killing MUD.

-drasnor
26 May 2006 ~ 8:00pm TheSmJ "Back in my day, it took over 9 hours to download a 4 MB file, in the snow, uphill both ways..."
26 May 2006 ~ 8:13pm RWB Ohh man... the most horrifying time in my life as I think back was WANTING AOL! Then eventually getting it and wanting anything but AOL, getting MSN and wishing I was back on AOL becuase of the stupid popup hand that would sheer through any game I was playing online(Dark Reign) and just wishing for that new system I saw on discovery to come out called DSL. Several years later my parents got it and I was never happier.

That's my life story BTW, hope you enjoyed. Dialup was so bad I almost never got into computers, except to take them apart and never re-assemble them LOL.