The fastest portion of the Internet is getting even faster: Universities have begun improving their capacity for high-speed data transmission, a process that will help researchers share information via Internet2.
At the beginning of October, Duke upgraded its Internet capacity 15-fold, but even more dramatic changes are in the works, said Alan Blatecky of the Microelectronic Center of North Carolina. With the installation of cutting-edge technology, he said, Duke's Internet2 capacity will grow another 20 times by the spring-giving Duke researchers the potential to quickly transmit large amounts of information to other points on the Internet2 network.
Internet2-the gateway through which Duke gains access to the Internet-was created several years ago as a response to the rising commercialization of the Internet. As the "dot-com" network became more congested with business- and recreation-oriented traffic, it lost much of its capacity to facilitate complex research, such as transmitting telescope images or sharing electrocardiogram data.
Because Internet2 is designed specifically for educational and research purposes, only a select group of institutions have access to it, including about 150 universities. Therefore, Duke's increased Internet2 capacity will not necessarily increase the rate at which Duke computers connect to commercial sites.
"Just because you have high-speed capacity," Blatecky said, "you can't talk to your aunt who has a phone line in her house."
Instead, the increased capacity will be most useful for scientific researchers, said Robert Currier, director of data communications for the Office of Information Technology.
"There is a telescope in South America doing control imaging from the United States. Over the commodity Internet, there is not enough bandwidth to cover the size of the huge telescope image," he said. "Internet2 will give us the ability to do things [to improve] quality of service-no delay, no jitter, no contention from someone trying to pull down the latest sports score."
Bandwidth is a technical term describing the speed of a communication link.
The forthcoming upgrade relies on a new technique called dense wave division multiplexing, Blatecky said. The $4 million system that MCNC will help the University install at the end of February will allow the use of different color lasers in simultaneous fiber-optic transmissions.
"Essentially, lasers are used to 'light' up a fiber-optic line; that is, you must use some sort of light to transmit anything over fiber optic lines, and since lasers are coherent light sources, they are the preferred source...," Blatecky said. "And, since different colors of light don't interfere with each other, you can increase the capacity of each fiber by adding more 'colors'-that is, if the color green can transmit a gigabit of data, so can the color yellow, red [or] blue."
By using these different light wavelengths, Blatecky said, the University will have the ability to designate certain colors for complex research needs.
"This is pretty new technology-some of the first things out," he said. "It's just being deployed at major companies. Duke is one of the first campuses to have it."
Also, he said, in January the University will install new router technology called Dynamic Packet Transport, which will facilitate even more high-speed connections.
The possibilities for this new capacity-and the applications that may come out of it-are virtually impossible to gauge, but the University is at least beginning to consider them in its long-term planning. One concern, for example, is making sure that free student use of this expanded technology will facilitate class-related research, not promote video phone conversations with friends at other universities.
"These are definitely future issues," Provost Peter Lange wrote in an e-mail. "We are including them in our thinking about planning: What is the likely pattern of development of demand? How will demand be affected both by expanded teaching and research uses... and by personal uses? What technological changes might affect that pattern or its impact on our bandwidth capacity?... What are the implications of the answers to all these questions for how we provide services at Duke and charge for them?"
For right now, MCNC is also working with North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-other institutions participating in Internet2-to install this new equipment.
College campuses, Blatecky said, are ideal testing grounds for the new applications developed via Internet2. "Universities and students tend to push the envelope," he said. "[They say,] 'If I had this, what else could I do?' They're willing to try new things."
However, he agreed with Lange: When campuses adopt these new technologies, there is no way to predict how they will actually be used. Blatecky pointed to MP3s as a phenomenon that no one expected would become important to college campuses.
"We do not do a good job of guessing what the future will be," he said. "The Internet was [originally] put together to share files-they hadn't even thought of e-mail."
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