What Is Internet2 And Is It The Next Big Breakthrough In Educational Technology?

Internet 2 is an attempt to create a very high speed internet backbone and has been worked on for several years now - since 1996 in fact.  At the present moment it is connected between a relatively small number of nodes - about 200 or so, almost all of which are either the property of major businesses or academic centres or research labs (working on internet 2 itself).  While most home users are happy to receive at 2 or 4Mbps, the main ISPs send and receive data on lines that run at 100Mbps or more.

Internet2 aims to make that figure seem like a snail crawling over treacle on a bad day.  It is talking in terms of a backbone connection speed of at least 10 Gbps - and this was achieved on the entire American Abilene backbone as early as 2004.  When fully developed, any institution connected to one of these superbackbones (in the UK SuperJanet is one example) can plug into internet2.

Applications can be run in real time over the internet, lectures from famous people or   concerts can be transmitted live with no data compression!!! The video of the Matrix can be downloaded in a couple  of seconds.  When complete, this will be a truly fabulous network and enable educational establishments to do things they can't even dream of just now!  

It's coming soon, and it rocks!