Colleges put Web on warp speed – Internet2 use at home may be slow coming

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.

By Adam Jones, Cox News Service

http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/technology/article/0,1299,DRMN_49_2657809,00.html

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, including some in Colorado, enjoys the benefits of Internet2. The nonprofit consortium’s high-speed, fiber-optic network – recently upgraded by a partnership that includes Denver-based Qwest Communications – brings data to dorm rooms at 10 megabits a second, 10 times the speed of a standard cable modem and almost 200 times faster than 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 researchers in 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 music and video a breeze, and to allow bandwidth-greedy applications such as videoconferencing, said Ron Hutchins, chief technology officer at Georgia Institute of Technology.

"People are using this stuff up," Hutchins said.

So it’s little wonder that after these students graduate, they "push the (telecommunications) business to have the same capability they had in college," Hutchins said.

Since the 1960s, whenever scientists have found ways to speed up the data networks that scientists 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."

"A lot of the trouble with the Internet now is really not so much a reflection of hard-to-solve technical problems but hard-to-solve human problems. The abuses of the Internet are so huge that they are really just dragging it down," said Jaron Lanier, an academic and former head of VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual reality products.

"The Internet, instead of being just an open network, is becoming more and more a world of fences and locks," he said.

It’s not just the human factor, however, 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."

Other companies, notably chip-maker Intel Corp., think that 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 that it can handle a large number of high-speed users.

In his "100 by 100" project, Zhang said, computer scientists and economists are studying ways to make technology more affordable and change industry structure so profits can be made.

Many scientists and researchers think some sort of government intervention is needed to speed the process.

"We can send someone to the moon if the government’s focused and sets a national agenda," Zhang said. "We should set a national challenge to build a major infrastructure for this country; otherwise we will fall behind other countries like Korea, Japan, China and India."