Internet2 and the K20 Initiative

Abstract

THERE IS a chapter in one of Robert Meager's books that was subtitled You Really Oughta Wanta. And the reason I'm writing this column is that, even if you have the best possible technology in your school, you really oughta wanta know about the high-performance national networks that make up Internet2. In the January 1998 column, titled and InternetE, I discussed the need for an Internet for K-12 education - what I called an InternetE. With the recent implementation of the Internet2's Initiative, such an Internet for K-12 education may become a reality. Since the Internet is a complicated conglomeration of networks, consortia, institutions, and corporations, explaining the K20 Initiative takes some doing, and a little background information might be helpful. The beginnings of the Internet as we know it can be traced back to the 1980s, when research universities around the U.S. started interconnecting their campus networks. In the 1980s and early 1990s, if you used the Internet you used tools like Gopher, Fetch, and such bulletin boards as the WELL. Gopher was used to find text files on servers across the network; Fetch was, and still is, used to send and receive files of all types; and, if you communicated with others, you probably used a computer bulletin board. In the mid-1980s, based largely on the genius of David Atkinson, Apple released HyperCard, which is the first program to recognize that associating information is often more useful than classifying it. I believe it is Atkinson's pioneering idea of associating or hyperlinking information that in the mid-1990s led the folks at CERN (Central European Research Network) to do the early work that created the World Wide Web and subsequently the first Web browser, Mosaic. Mosaic was followed first by Netscape Navigator and later by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The point to remember here is that the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different things. The Internet is a network of networks, and the Web consists of server and browser software that gives access to a vast amount of content. In about 1997 the Internet community opened up the Internet to commercial traffic (the rise of the so-called dot-coms), and, as you might guess, this made the Internet a very crowded place. Since the university community created the original Internet, it only made sense that it would band together a second time to create the Internet2. Internet2 is a consortium established in 1997 among the nation's top research universities, in partnership with industry and government, to develop and deploy advanced network and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. . . . There are currently 185 Internet2 member universities and 18 Internet2 nonprofit and Corporate Collaboration Sites across the nation. Internet2 also maintains gateways to over 19 international high-performance research and education networks and five high-performance federal agency research networks in the U.S. . . . The goals of Internet2 are to: * Create a leading-edge network capability for the national research community * Enable Internet * Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and to the broader Internet community.1 Remember the second purpose; it's an important one. Internet2 member institutions are primarily large research universities. Typically, member universities pay from $100,000 to $500,000 per year and agree to donate up to three full-time positions to support Internet2 connections and activities. A majority of university members use National Science Foundation research grants to fund at least part of their Internet2 dues. It is important to stress here that the Internet2 Conditions of Use (CoU) agreements specify that the high-speed networks it supports are to be used for revolutionary Internet applications and not to support general traffic or replace the commodity Internet. …