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23 February 2004

Internet2 NOT coming to a home near you

By Adam Jones

ADAM JONES
WASHINGTON BUREAU
www.statesman.com

When Justin Bland surfs the Web in his dorm room at George Washington University, the pages snap into view on his iMac in seconds.

The convenience has made him a citizen of the Internet who gets most of his information, entertainment and even parts of his education online.

Bland's always-connected, ultra-high-speed service is a big improvement over his experience back home in Richmond, Va. There, Internet dial-up service "takes, like, five minutes to hook up," he said, and he often just checks e-mail because graphic-heavy Web pages take too long to load.

"Every time I go back and use it, it's pretty miserable," the sophomore geography and sociology major said.

Bland, like students at 205 universities nationwide, enjoys the
benefits of Internet2. The nonprofit consortium's high-speed fiber-optic network brings data to dorm rooms at 10 megabits a second, 10 times the speed of a standard cable modem and almost 200 times as fast as a dial-up connection.

But when Bland leaves college, he'll be back in a slow motion Web world.

Researchers say it'll be a decade before advanced networks bring lightning performance to the majority of home users. There are technological, economic and human hurdles to overcome, they say.

Like the original Internet, Internet2 started as a way for universities to share large volumes of research data. It provides service to campus labs at 100 megabits per second, fast enough to transmit the contents of a DVD in 47 seconds.

The same fiber-optic network serves student dorms at a rate that's significantly slower but still fast enough to make downloading musid and video a breeze and to allow bandwidth-greedy applications such as videoconferencing, said Ron Hutchins, chief technology officer at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Since the 1960s, whenever scientists have found ways to speed up the data networks they use, ordinary consumers have eventually benefited.

"It's been the case throughout the history of computing that the science communities and advanced users have created capability, which then finds its way into broader use," said Dan Atkins, dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan and former head of a commission charged by the federal government to study the future of networking.

But the migration of those past advances largely took place before the Internet turned into what it is today: an insecure network crowded with 180 million connected computers, 350 million users and 40 million Web sites that's still growing.

"The founders of the Internet got a lot of things right, but they
didn't realize how successful their technology would be," said Steve Corbato, Internet2's director of backbone network infrastructure. With that popularity has come a host of well-known online problems such as computer viruses, unwanted commercial e-mail and privacy-invading "spyware."

It's not just the human factor that's standing in the way of lightning-fast Internet service for your home computer.

One of the first challenges will be abandoning technology designed for telephone and TV and building a network specifically for the Internet, said Hui Zhang, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Zhang is the lead researcher on "100 Megabits to 100 Million Homes," a $7.5 million National Science Foundation initiative started in September that hopes to show how a fiber-based wireless telecommunications network can bring reliable, high-speed Internet access to every home and small business in America.

Today's telephone network uses copper wire technology invented in the 19th century that connects homes to switching stations located up to 18,000 feet away, Zhang said.

It is at the switching station that relatively slow-speed signals
from the home meet the fiber-optic "backbone" of the Internet, which runs at up to 10 gigabits per second. To enjoy the same speed as students at Internet2 universities, home users need a fiber-optic or equally fast connection to the backbone, a problem known in the industry as the "last mile."

Some companies, notably chip maker Intel Corp., think a high-speed wireless technology called WiMax will become the preferred way to bridge the last mile because of the rising costs of laying fiber-optic cables to millions of homes.

However the connection to homes is achieved, a major technological challenge will remain: rebuilding the Internet backbone so it can handle a large number of high-speed users.

"When we get to a point where every home and business in the country is accessing the network at 100 megabits per second, we will need to redo the core of the Internet," said Larry Landweber, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin's computer science department and a senior adviser to the National Science Foundation.

Some experts see economics as the biggest obstacle to universal high-speed service.

"The economic model doesn't add up," Zhang said. "Everybody knows the Internet is the future. We just don't know how to make a profitable business out of it."