Internet 2: scaling up the backbone for R&D

In 1996 universities in the United States announced a plan to create a faster, more powerful network for academic purposes, calling their project Internet 2. The announcement capped work from several meetings held over the previous year to articulate the network requirements of the research community, requirements that participants felt would likely not be addressed by the private sector. At about the same time, President Clinton committed the government to spend $100 million in developing Internet technology, calling his project the Next Generation Internet Initiative (NGII). Thus, the groundwork has been laid for another collaboration between the university research community and government agencies. Its backers hope it will pay off in advanced applications development and ultimately in transfer to the commercial sector, based on the overwhelming impact of the privatization of the NSFnet. The paper discusses the first phase of the project which will implement Internet 2 connections to the National Science Foundation´s very high speed backbone network service