Internet II is coming...

Tue Oct 8 17:10:52 UTC 1996

fyi
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>From www.nytimes.com:

          October 7, 1996

          University Internet Proposed

          By LAWRENCE M. FISHER

          A group of 34 research universities agreed last week
          to create a new national network for higher
          education, to be called Internet II, which will offer
          higher speeds and more reliable service than the current
          Internet.

          As described in the Oct. 11 issue of The Chronicle of
          Higher Education, the new network is intended to deliver
          the vastly higher speeds needed to allow the
          simultaneous transmission of voice, video and data.
          Internet II would give researchers the bandwidth they
          need to enable distance learning, digital libraries and
          on-line collaborative research.

          The organizers of Internet II say its advanced
          capabilities will ultimately become available on the
          existing Internet as commercial service providers find
          ways to offer more bandwidth -- a bigger pipeline to
          transmit a high volume of information -- at attractive
          prices. The research universities have agreed to
          establish and finance a new organization, with
          membership fees to help create the network. They also
          hope to get financing from telecommunications and
          computer companies, as well as from the federal
          government.

          "What we're trying to do is solve a whole bunch of
          technical problems having to do with making the Internet
          operate at a higher level of functionality," said
          Michael Roberts, who has been working on the Internet II
          proposal and is vice president of Educom, a consortium
          of nearly 600 colleges and 100 companies that promote
          computing in higher education. "What everybody needs is
          something on the order of 10 times more bandwidth."

          According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the
          decision to move forward with the plan was made during a
          meeting of campus technology officers in Chicago last
          week. Computer science specialists from Pennsylvania
          State and Stanford universities and the Universities of
          California, Chicago, Michigan and North Carolina will
          play leading roles in the network's development.