Communications of the ACM
Internet2 at 20: Alive and Kicking
Nearly 20 years after its launch, Internet2 is quietly humming along on university campuses across the country.
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Nearly two decades since its launch, Internet2 continues to run on U.S. university campuses, connecting researchers and performing research and development operations.
"In this country, there are lots of research institutions with lots of clever people that are by default utterly unaware of each other's work," notes Mimecast's Nathaniel Borenstein. "Internet2 has a way of bringing them together and making these services more widely available."
Internet2 diversified into network-based services once it had brought better bandwidth to research universities, but people lost track of its purpose following this transition. Such services include the inCommon federated identity management service, which can connect people from multiple institutions.
Internet2 also has been pushing into internal and external cloud services via efforts such as Internet2 Net+ services.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln CIO Mark Askren says high-speed connectivity is still needed by universities, but server location is no longer important, as long as the connectivity is sustained.
Internet2 has a collective 8.8 terabits of capacity on its network, with 100-gigabit links to participating universities via an OpenFlow/software-defined network.
Internet2 CEO Dave Lambert says the network's full hosting on OpenFlow for two years has had a significant impact on catalyzing open networking foundations and open network creation.
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