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By Ruthann Benyshek
As amazing as its impact has been, the Internet cannot meet all the needs of higher education. Realizing that, approximately 150 universities have joined together with government and industry  partners to accelerate Internet2, the next stage of Internet development in academia.
UGA has participated since the early stages of Internet2 and recently advanced another step toward realization of Internet2 goals by establishing connection to the Abilene network. Abilene is a project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, which is the home of the Internet2 project. Abilene is a national high-performance network spanning over 10,000 miles using advanced fiber optics. It operates at 2.4 gigabits per second, a speed 45,000 times faster than a 56K modem. Abilene connects regional network aggregation centers, including the Southern Crossroads, or SoX, GigaPoP.
SoX, a cooperative initiative by the members of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, is designed to facilitate access to current and future highly integrated digital-communications services for education, research and economic development. SoX will connect both Internet2 and non-Internet2 members to each other, enhancing opportunities for collaboration among instructional and research faculty throughout the Southeast.
In August, UGA, in collaboration with the board of regents’ PeachNet, moved to an OC3 data line for connection to the SoX GigaPoP. OC3 lines carry data at speeds around 155 million bits per second; the T1 lines previously used at UGA carried 1.5 million bits per second. The OC3 speed is now available to UGA users in connecting to other Internet2-member institutions.
UGA’s connection to Abilene is the result of a High Performance Networking Connections grant from the National Science Foundation.
“By combining this UGA grant with equivalent grants from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama at Huntsville, we were able to pay the connection fee to the Abilene network for all university members of the Southern Crossroads,” says Walter B. McRae, UGA’s associate vice president for computing and networking. “That’s a definite plus in moving UGA and the region toward Internet2 connection.”
Internet2 will make possible instruction and research applications--such as high-quality video, telemedicine, digital libraries, sharing of very large databases, and virtual laboratories--that are not possible with the technology underlying today’s Internet.
Public-service applications will inevitably grow out of these research applications.
Universities are taking the lead in Internet2 development because they need advanced networking technologies, and they employ technical experts who can implement such technologies. In addition, university research and education missions increasingly require collaboration between specialists located throughout the country. Many of these tasks are not possible with the constraints of today’s Internet.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Detailed information about the UGA computer network and campus networking initiatives:
www.uga.edu/netinfo
For additional information about Internet2 and Abilene:
http://www.internet2.edu
http://www.ucaid.edu
http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene
http://www.uga.edu/ucns/tti/Computer_Review/Summer98/sox.html
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