What is Internet2?

uh so let's see. Um. Yeah, I got some special to start this one off. You know what's coming. We all know what's coming. Listen. It's listener mail, all right, listener man, you got it. We're happy now, Okay, that's oh all right, I'm just stunned. Yeah, I'm sure our listeners are too. Okay. This one comes from Scotty. Scotty says I would like to know more about the Internet to project. There's a website, but not that much to tail. Thank you, Thank you Scotty for that listener me, I

really appreciate it. That was so we thought we'd talked about internet too. Oh right, do you want to jump. Yeah, I think maybe, uh, I shouldn't have written it down as Internet t o O. So this this mean I need to start. Yeah, it's funny that you brought that up, Scotty, because this is one of these things that you know people here about from time to time, but nobody ever

really talks about. It was supposed to be this big thing back in the in the mid nineties, because everybody was talking about the imminent collapse of the Internet and how it's all going to blow up, and how the educational users of the Internet, we're all gonna go off and start their own thing called Internet Too and you can keep this Internet. We're gonna have our own. I'm taking my ball and going home. So yeah, it didn't exactly work out that way, but there is still an

Internet Too. Yeah. So there are a lot of miscau receptions about it, mainly because, again, let's Chris pointed out, not very many people chat about it that much. So Internet Too it's it's it's two different things. First of all, if you're thinking like there's a super secret Internet that exists below our current Internet, that's not what Internet Too is. Now, that's something else. Entirely we can't talk about it. We can't that's the dark net. We can't go into that.

So anyway, the Internet too, that's it's really a consortium. Yes, it's a group of universities, research institutes, corporations that have got had They've come together to create an environment wherein uh, these these different organizations can utilize a network, a very high speed network for purposes of research and sharing knowledge,

that kind of thing. So sort of the same thing that the original and you know what, the original intent of the Internet was, go way back, and there there is it is kind of from what I could tell in my research, Um, there is kind of a second Internet along the lines of the regular Internet that they use. They all have high speed fiber optic connections. But it's not a separate internet. Um, so they are. They are dedicated, it's dedicated hardware what you're talking about. Yeah, but it

is part of the Internet as a whole. It's just that they are the only ones who have access to that. Yeah, they were talking about very special routers. We're talking about special a special backbone, a fiber backbone for this this Internet that stretches thirteen thousand five miles if I remember correctly, from my little sheet of facts, and um the kilometer conversion not because I did it just before we came

in here. So so I'm sorry to all of our friends in other nations, but we're talking about United States centric thing anyways. So Internet to the the idea here is that we they these research organizations. Let's let's take a quick step back into the way back machine and talk about the origins of the Internet and UH and

networks in general. If you go all the way back to our panet, you're talking about several research institutions uh networking together and sending information from one massive computer to another. And the one of the ultimate goals here was being able to share knowledge at really really rapid speeds. And uh so the Internet for a long time, that's really

what was all about. It was mostly schools, universities, research organizations that was that used these these lines in order to share information and open up databases so that places that had a really rich amount of information on a specific subject could share it with everybody instead of it just being centralized in one location. Yep. As a matter of fact, the first time I used the Internet, which

was nineteen and a half years ago. Now, um, you know that that's you know, nobody had heard of the internet. I mean people had heard of the Internet, but uh, you like, if you went up to somebody on the street and said, hey, you know, what kind of Internet connection you have at home, they wouldn't have because they wouldn't have really known about it and what it was

and what it was supposed to be for. But everybody, and you know, the college where I went, would have email connections and uh you know, could use chat and you know, basic basic functions protocols in two colors, green and black. I have all sorts of colors here. Uh So, yeah, the that was the the original kind of purpose for the Internet. And then of course the Internet opened up to everybody, and then came the World Wide Web eventually, which again originated as sort of a project on this

this college university environment. But once the Web opened up to everybody and the Internet really opened up to everybody, suddenly you've got this this great network. But it's being used for lots of different things, not just research and and sending information or or calculating law numbers. And if you wanted to do that kind of stuff, if you wanted to do the massive amounts of research or sending

lots of information between one major group and another. Uh, it meant competing for bandwidth with all these other applications that everybody else was using. So suddenly this incredibly useful research tool and academic tool became less useful. Uh not that it completely was, you know, useless. It's still how to use. It just wasn't nearly as fast as it

had been because now everybody was on it. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of commercial traffic now, So all those other packets were going back to the whole Information super Highway name that we used to give the Internet. I don't know how many of our listeners actually remember that, um I do, but the Information super Highway. Think of

it like that. Like originally the super highway was allowed only allowed traffic from ten percent of the population on that highway, and it was lanes wide, exact, there's no one in the way, you can go as fast as you want, there's nothing to worry about. And then the highway opens up for everyone something You've got traffic jams everywhere.

That's essentially what we're talking about here, and that's that's why everybody was talking about this in the mid nineties about how the Internet was going to implode under the weight of all the traffic. Well, it's one of those things. Actually, I think the the information super Highway at that point was maybe four lanes wide. But that's the thing, you know, people, you don't really see this, but as the Internet grows in traffic, they're also adding on more lanes of super highway.

UM so, I mean it's it's really grown to handle more traffic as time has worn on. It's just that, you know, there's infinitely more traffic going on. It's just like in the real physical world. Yeah, exactly. So so what's the solution. Well, the solution is to build a different set of roads for just the universities. UM. Back in October one in Chicago, a group of they for

university they had salmon for lunch. Thirty four universities. UH representatives from thirty four universities met in a Chicago hotel and they committed to this idea of forming an organization at that time called Internet Too. And the organization would also be dedicated in to finding ways of dedicating specific resources to the academic research world and uh academic and research, I should say, just academic research and UH so that

that kind of set the ball in motion. It wasn't until we started actually seeing corporations kind of join into on us and uh and provide the hardware that was gonna be necessary. You know, you had to have grant money come in to fund it. And you might say, well, what how does this benefit the rest of us? I mean, I'm not, for instance, I haven't been in college in a long time, So how do I benefit from this

Internet Too thing? While they're a lot of different ways we benefit, one very simple one is that Internet Too. You can think of it as the way the way Internet to his website describes it. You can think of their network as being four to five years ahead of our current technology that we use on the Internet right now. And then, in a on to our sister podcast, High Speed Stuff, I think of its sort of as a

test track for the Internet. So yeah, you can think of it like, well, so their technology is why why don't we have that technology in a more widespread, universal kind of of of approach. Well, the reason is that this Internet Too is being used as a as a test track. You can't be sure that everything is going to work. In fact, most stuff isn't going to work.

The first time out, you're gonna have to tweak it, and you're gonna have to adjust it, and I'll and that's eventually the the successes are going to trickle down into everything that we use. It's just gonna take a few years. But the the fact that this exists allows researchers to create new applications, new uh coding. I mean, there's all sorts of things that they can do you over this network that they couldn't do over the regular Internet. Yeah, and it's you know, now that the Internet is such

a big part of all of our lives. Um, if they tried to, you know, throw the switch and convert everybody over to a new technology overnight, it's bound to take out a large section of the Internet worldwide. And that's you know, that's the reason for needing to keep that in a separate test environment. But there are already some things that that we're seeing, you know, that have been developed from Internet to technology. I mean, they were pioneers in i p v six technology, which is the

newer version of the Internet Protocol address UM. Basically, to accommodate the number of people on the Internet, you have to have you know, everybody's got an address where your information is sent, and uh, you know, there are so many people and only so many I P numbers that they can use, so they basically tacked on a couple of octets on the uh the IP address. I mean I'm oversimplifying here, but this is one of the things that they tried out on Internet to was, you know,

will I PV six work? And uh, you know, now gradually it's sort of making us way over into the real world. Yeah, and you're you know, we we talked about the the speed of this network. You might be wondering how fast is it. Well, the backbone can support speeds of up to a hundred gigabits per second. That's a little fast. That's amazingly lightning fast. If for a comparison, I looked up Verizon's FiOS service Yes, Yes, which comes in several different tiers. The first one, I believe is

fifteen megabits per second. That's megabits as opposed to gigabits. You know, we're talking about orders of magnitude here. Uh. And the fastest that I saw, which may not be Verizon's fastest because I just did this very quickly, was fifty combits per second, which is still tiny. Now. Now the hundred gigabits per second we're talking about, that's the backbone. That's just the information being able to travel across the

backbone of this network. The interfaces that people are actually using do not go that fast, um, although they're trying to support interfaces that would support go up to around forty gigabits per second right now, as I recall UM, which is again lightning fast. And you may say, well, why do they need speeds that high, Well, some of

the applications are using involve enormous numbers and calculations. For example, the Large Hadron Collider when it finally goes online, assuming it ever does, uh, that data is going to be shared with scientists from around the world. And it's not just going to be the people who are at the CERN facility. They're gonna be other laboratories. They're going to use this information to really take a look at what

makes our universe tick. So we're talking about big, big questions here, which coincidentally require big big numbers when you're when you're crunching the data, and so all of the information that's coming out is going to take up huge amounts of bandwidth and so without a dedicated network, uh, it would take ages for that information to get to where it's going. Another thing they work on on Internet too is middleware. They have a middleware initiative and that

Uh it's not very sexy, I gotta admit. UM basically it's a it's a type of software, but it negotiates connections. I mean it involves UM things like authentication, identification, security, UM directories. It's the kind of thing that will help you, you know, get one packet to the other end of the network and back, uh, you know, more smoothly and and securely than it would necessarily using an UM less adept technology. And eventually we can hope to see the

sort of network capability extend to our Internet. Again, when we're talking about why is in our Internet as fast as there's there, don't not to make an US versus them sort of thing. But for Internet to you've got to remember this is going to some very specific schools and some resource organizations, and that's about it. So the network does not have to be as broad as it

would have to be for consumers. It doesn't have to stretch into various neighborhoods it's going to very specific locations, so when you're laying the fiber, you don't have to lay it everywhere like you would with a more widespread approach. So you know, to to try and develop that for

an entire nation would be very expensive. And and that's another thing is that there's a lot of money that's going into this project, and it's being raised by various foundations, organizations, donations, some of the companies are donating time and uh um resources to this, so it's not like a more widespread nationwide fiber network is going to just pop up out of nowhere. And the the Internet Too, is a nonprofit organization too, so it's uh you know, completely dedicated to

research and Internet research. So now grant this hasn't stopped people from trying to use it to do naughty things. I read a report about students at various universities who had created a site on Internet too that or they didn't create it, they were they were using a site that was a file sharing site meant to share research files, that sort of thing, to distribute videos and music and things of that nature. So again, you know, once again,

you you've got the fast network access. There's someone's going to use it to download a movie. And uh, of course at that speed you can get a high definition film and a couple of minutes. It's not the same thing as if you were dialing up over Kazaar or something. So yeah, the I'll imagine if it takes you a couple of hours to download a film, whether you're doing so legitimately or otherwise, we'll only take you a minute

or two maybe using this connection. I can see why some people were tempted to do that, although you know it's not what it was intended for. No, not at all, but it happens. That's about all of God. Oh good, because I'm done too. But that, of course brings us to listener me. Yes, and this listener mail comes from j s a k A Mac Daddy, Chris and Jonathan. I have listened to every one of your podcasts, which get me through the daily monotony of commuting two and

from work. I have an English literature degree, but gravitate to all things tech. I heard your challenge or a Spencerian Sonnet, so I felt compelled to give one a whirl. I am an avid Mac user, but use Windows XP Pro at work. I do love my Max, my MacBook, my wife's MacBook, and my daughter's iMac all work great with a virtual Windows machine on them. But I can assure you that Microsoft isn't the monster that most Mac freaks make them out to be. I'd be lost without

Microsoft Office for both Mac and Windows. And so here's the sonnets, the war between the giants, waging a war of Apples and Windows. Who'll win their dumb be all and ind all brawl competing for markets? Frustration grows the more you see and here, the more you stall. The world was made for Windows, after all, but Max are rising, gaining every day. For Apple needs no quarter. After all, we buy more iPods and i phones today for tomorrow.

Apples won't go away, but find a niche it every market share and soon, well soon will their trails converge. As you say, so they both will operate in the air, both move along the same old dusty road, fighting so hard for their tragger load. Thanks JS, that's awesome. The Apples versus Uh Microsoft in in poletic form. I liked it. I like you very much, and I agree. Uh. You know, Microsoft Office for Mac is. I think it's good. I think it's a fantastic product. Well there you go. So

it's got the endorsement from Mr Blatt endorse anything. I just I like it. Yeah, so send those checks to how Sta care of Johnson Strickland. Hey, I'm just I don't want you to get overwhelmed by mail. Uh So this is one of several sonnets I've been sent in. We are going to eventually get through all of them. I think it's amazing that our listeners have done this, And thank you all. Thank you JS for listending this one.

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