Re: UW-Madison Announcement: Internet2 connection speeds data t

[Heiko Recktenwald <UZS106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>]

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From: Jay Robert Hauben <jrh29@columbia.edu>
<schnippererer>

>From
                 Report From INET98 and IFWP-Geneva
			        by Jay Hauben
			           jrh@ais.org

>From July 20 to 24, INET98, the eighth annual conference of the
Internet Society (ISOC), was held in Geneva, Switzerland.

 . . .

A number of sessions discussed the Internet II project. In this project
over 130 academic and non-academic organizations have joined together to
develop a new network that would achieve speeds or bandwidth up to 1000
times that of the current Internet. Academic institutions can join the
Internet II consortium for a contribution between $500,000 and
$2,000,000 which severely limits participation to the better
endowed institutions. Commercial entities can join for a
contribution of $25,000 usually in kind. The purpose of the
Internet II project is to insure that educational and research
users would still have a network even if the current trend toward
commercialization and privatization of the Internet might
marginalize their access to the current Internet. The strategy is
to connect the consortium members with their own network not
compatible with the Internet and then win the rest of the world
over to their protocols. However this bifurcation of the Internet
may not be easily repairable. Email and chat and other common
uses of the Internet would stay on Internet I until Internet II
protocols were adopted by everyone which also limits the value of
Internet II. [Many Europeans expressed concern that this project
was basically limited to US institutions and corporations.]
. . .

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Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 9 No 1 Winter 1998-1999
available on line at http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACN9-1.txt or via
email from jrh@ais.org. The section above is from a Report from INET98
available at http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/geneva/INET98.txt
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<schniippel>