Internet2 – 100Gb/s and beyond October 11, 2007
Posted by Al in : future,Internet , trackback30 years ago the Internet began to grow as links between universities and research labs spread, and as the people using this new technology were also the right people to develop it, speeds increased. As usual data transferred grew with the increases in speed and so these data links got faster,and spread further, into businesses and offices everywhere, and so the Internet slowly became available to the masses.
Currently Internet traffic is reaching the point where even backbones are starting to struggle; and as traffic is still increasing to reach the ceiling of available bandwidth, then so data carriers are having to invest more money to prevent utilisation and congestion from slowing everything down and causing unreliable connections. Which seems like a perfect time for Internet2 to be reaching it’s official launch in January next year.
Internet2 uses different wavelengths of light to form separate data channels through one piece of fibre. This allows multiple 10Gb/s links to be run down one cable, and currently there are 100Gb/s links between over 200 universities in the US. That’s a lot of bandwidth, and should hold off any congestion problems for a while. We’ll have to wait and see whether Internet2 grows to run alongside our current Internet, or maybe even to replace the current infrastructure.
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