What Was the Greatest Thing Before Sliced Bread?
Q: Will Internet2 ever be real for the general public, or is it just an extended experiment in the university environment? A: Depends on what you mean by “Internet2.” In actual fact, Internet2 is a consortium, originally and formally organized in 1997, as the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). Its mission is to develop and maintain a state-of-the-art, high speed network which serves the bandwidth-intensive needs of the U.S. research and academic community. Internet2 created a network called Abilene (now generally referred to as the Internet2 Network). You can see a map of it here, and another, with real-time statistics, here. Will we soon see a replacement for the current Internet? I believe it’s pretty much inevitable. For one thing, fiber-optic links are quite a bit easier to maintain (read: cheaper) than copper ones. They’re certainly faster. More importantly, the “next Internet” will use the new IPv6 addressing scheme as a replacement for the old IPv4
