Prospects for the Internet

The current Internet was built for a world of a few million users, utilizing relatively lowspeed communications links with limited functions (such as the World Wide Web and Web browsers). Accommodating the traffic generated by anticipated billions of users and trillions of digital devices necessitates significant technological evolution. Higher education is playing a pivotal role in this evolution through the Internet2 project. Internet2 is a consortium of more than 200 research universities, 70 corporations, and 30 government laboratories, with linkages to more than 30 nations. Further, nearly 10,000 colleges and universities, schools, libraries, and museums around the United States have access to Internet2’s backbone network, Abilene, through sponsored memberships. Much as the early DARPAnet served as the precursor to the first Internet, Internet2 had as its original goal the creation of the next-generation Internet, with a focus on addressing the needs of the research community. For many applications, particularly those in emerging areas of e-science, the commercial Internet is simply not evolving rapidly enough in terms of available bandwidth. Hence, the Internet2 network infrastructure is designed to be a closed-system test bed for developing and deploying advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Its purpose is threefold: to create a leading-edge network capability for the national higher education and research community, to enable revolutionary Internet applications, and to ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community. Through efforts such as Internet2, higher educa-