Six years after the federal government proposed creating a second internet that would leapfrog the first with speed and technology, most users - business and consumer - are still saddled with the low speeds, transmission delays and the other quirks of today's Net.

This is the age of Internet time, right? So, where's that gigabit-fiber-to-the-PC, priority-packet, streaming-three-dimensional-video Ubernet? And how about the millions of public dollars spent so far on advanced networking research?

"There have not been a lot of tangible results so far," says Scott Rayder, senior technology policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and a former aide to the House Science Committee, who helped draw up funding rules for the projects. "We have not seen, to this point, public return on this, and a lot of people are concerned."

Give it time, say the folks who have been working on projects such as the university-driven Internet2 and the government-sponsored Next Generation Internet (NGI). You may live in the Internet age, but the advances these two groups are trying to make are the stuff of science and experimentation. Like the wine in the old Orson Welles ads, they won't be ready before their time.

"This is about incremental progress in these technologies," says Sally Howe, associate director at the National Coordinating Office for Information Technology Research and Development, which oversees interagency work on computing matters, including advanced networks.

Although those inside the projects acknowledge there are few - if any - tangible "deliverables" that the public can see as a result of Internet2 and NGI, they say advances are being made on very tough problems and, eventually, results will come. It's just not easy to say what results.

"We have some pretty outstanding efforts now, but what's come of it? It's a little hard to say, because we have so many initiatives it is hard to pick out the ones that are going to be the most important," says Doug Van Houwelin, president and chief executive of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, the university consortium running the Internet2 project. Who knew, for example, that a student project in the early 1990s would create the Web browser, which would result in a boom in the use of the Internet by hundreds of millions of PC owners?

After all, says George Strawn, deputy director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), it took more than three decades for the original Internet to go from idea to what researchers refer to as the "commodity Internet" - the one most of us use. The ARPAnet was conceived as a research tool, and it was "our great fortune" that it had unexpected commercial and educational uses that created unforeseen benefits to society.

"If you raised the same question in 1974 - asked people working on the ARPAnet, 'Is the public investment in the [project] worth it?' - I think they'd have had to dance a bit for you," Strawn says. "And I think we'd have to dance a little bit for you today."

That's not to say that researchers in government, academia and industry aren't making strides in creating a more advanced Internet.

There are currently two distinct high-speed fiber-optic backbones spanning the country as a result of projects begun by the government in the mid-1990s. Hundreds of universities and a handful of corporate partners are tied into those backbones. Separately, a gaggle of high-profile agencies have constructed their own advanced networks, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the NSF.

While the major backbones are both operated by private companies, there are connection points between them around the country, and certain users on those backbones can also connect through them to the government's advanced networks. While the experimental nature of the networks means they don't have gateways to the commercial Internet, the goal is for the work on all of the networks to lead to technical improvements that can someday migrate to the commercial sphere.

A few corporate partners have already taken technological advances from the work on Internet2 and the NGI projects and placed them into their most advanced commercial backbone offerings.

"The answer to your question is, yes, we are making progress, and the reason it doesn't show in some dramatic way is that it is down in the core of the Net," says Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Researchers also caution that the efforts under way to create improved network technologies and applications are not intended to create a sort of "replacement Internet" that will be put into service all at once. Rather than some kind of giant switch being thrown one day, at which point the old Internet dies and a new one replaces it, the process will be far more gradual, as new technologies begin to take over for existing ones.

"It's quite impossible to ever have a 'flag day' again - the Internet is far too big to have one," says Steven Bellovin, an AT&T fellow, referring to a complete switchover on a given day. "The last flag day was Jan. 1, 1983, when we converted from the old ARPAnet protocol to TCP/IP [Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol]. You can't even contemplate such a thing now."

Most who are old hands when it comes to the Internet will tell you there's always change and experimentation happening. But the formal idea for working toward some sort of separate, second national network began around 1994, when the NSF prepared to turn over control of the NSFnet - the last public remnant of the original Internet - to commercial management.

Commercialization left some of the Internet's initial clients, namely research universities and government laboratories, without the data playground they had long enjoyed. When the government permitted commercial use of the Internet in 1991, it quickly gobbled up the available bandwidth once relied upon by original Internet users.

Even if the overloaded commercial Internet could handle the size of their demands - which grew less feasible with each million new users - researchers judged it unlikely that consumers and businesses would put up with a network upon which potentially damaging experiments were constantly being run.

"A lot of these experiments you can't do on the live Internet, because you can't risk the interruption of communication to people," Bellovin says. "It's easy to put together something that looks fine on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world."

In fact, researchers sometimes "wall off" a portion of the experimental backbones and deliberately run destructive programs to see what happens and how things behave. Researchers have discovered that the basic Internet protocol, TCP/IP, behaves in unexpected ways when it is used in enormous, ultra-fast backbones.

The real problem was that nobody could really afford to create a new research network alone. Universities didn't have the cash; indeed, many of them have obtained grants from the NSF to pay for their advanced Internet connections. The government couldn't afford the kind of bottomless-pit funding for basic research that marked much of the Cold War era in areas such as atomic weapons or the space program. And private industry is too focused on short-term profitability from its research to build a test bed with a 20-year horizon.

"It's a lot easier for a couple of kids in a garage to start a microcomputer revolution with chips than for those same kids in garages to compete with global network forces," Strawn says. The barriers to entry are simply too great. "It can happen, but not in an Internet timeframe."

So with some federal money as a catalyst, a consortium of universities to do much of the research and corporate partners willing to exchange money or equipment for the chance at firsthand involvement in the research, the U.S. has embarked on its quest for a better Internet.

Under Construction

The federal government continues to invest millions of dollars in its part of the advanced Internet projects; over the past three years, it has spent US$272 million - which officials regard as seed money. Much of the money is awarded in the form of competitive grants for either a specific research project or to assist universities in paying for the connection to an ultra-high-speed backbone. The commercial cost for an OC-3 (155-megabit-per-second) connection to one of the backbones is US$21,600 per month.

The government also spends hundreds of millions of dollars on special high-speed network projects for some of the most demanding agency uses: the DOD, which seeks the most advanced battlefield intelligence; the DOE, for modeling atomic blasts and being able to maintain the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile without conducting actual bomb explosions; and NASA, for the complexities of space missions and communications.

But the government is, in fiscal terms, a junior partner in most of the efforts. Not only do universities commit resources to advanced Internet research, but also corporate co-sponsors provide money and in-kind services worth more than the government's contribution. Companies such as Cisco Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and Qwest Communications International have made substantial investments in partnerships with universities.

Qwest, for example, has made a five-year commitment to the UCAID to lend the consortium an enormous fiber-optic network. With 10,000 miles of fiber capable of OC-48 (2.5-gigabit-per-second) speeds, the network would cost US$500 million to lease commercially, says Greg Cook, vice president of Internet services at Qwest.

"It's not a lot of money, and it's highly leveraged," Howe says. Advanced Internet research in the U.S. actually comes in two flavors: Internet2, where the government's direct role ended in 1999, and the NGI, which is largely government sponsored.

Internet2 was started in late 1996 by a consortium of 34 universities that were concerned about creating a test bed for large-scale networking technology and applications outside of the commercial Internet. Federal dollars helped build what are now two distinct fiber-optic backbones in the U.S.: one called VBNS, now operated by WorldCom; and the other known as Abilene, managed by Indiana University and operated by Cisco, Nortel and Qwest. There are nearly 200 universities and research labs, including government labs, connected to the two backbones, says Greg Wood, a spokesman at the UCAID. There are about 70 corporate partners as well.

The NGI is a federal research project involving most of the agencies that have advanced networks. It is overseen by the National Coordinating Office for Information Technology Research and Development and by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

In effect, much of the work is interconnected in a way that former Novell Chief Executive Ray Noorda would have called "co-opetition": While the different projects and networks compete to develop technology and software with potential uses in both research and commerce, there is a relatively open exchange of information.

"Everything we do is available to people, and we don't have any sort of intellectual property constraints or trade secrets," Van Houwelin says. But he acknowledges that companies that become partners have a leg up on their competitors because "it is the case in the Internet world that people who do it first get the advantage."

Indeed, the projects have exposed some problems that aren't at all technical in nature.

Take an area such as quality of service - in essence, being able to guarantee that a particular time-dependent application's data, such as a videoconference, will receive priority on the network, so the bits will arrive in time to be reassembled into a usable image. Researchers say the chief problem uncovered with QOS isn't technical - indeed, such guarantees are offered by some commercial networks today - but economic. Nobody is sure what business model will work to allow QOS guarantees to span multiple Internet service providers and ensure that everyone is appropriately compensated.

The advanced projects, though, have brought corporate partners together to begin working out such economic details as well as the technical ones, the partners says.

Most of the researchers say there are a few significant areas in which improvements over the commodity Internet are already being realized in the advanced networks:

Multicasting: Listening to streaming audio or watching an online video on today's Internet can be a strain for many users. It can also be a strain on the provider. Each user who wants to view the program must have an individual video stream sent to the target computer. If enough people want their own streams, the capacity of the server to deliver them can be quickly exhausted.

Advanced networking researchers are working on the technology needed to solve the problem. The new approach to multicasting would permit the source server to send out a single data stream that would be "mirrored" by other servers. Any number of users would be able to tap into the stream along the way.

Multicasting is already being used on some campuses to deliver lectures and other educational programming to students who aren't in the classroom. For commercial use, researchers are working on adding security components to keep private transmissions closed to all but authorized users.

Multicasting could be one of the first aspects of advanced network research to become a mainstream public phenomenon: It's one of the cornerstones of future entertainment products that could include three-dimensional and virtual reality components.

Optical Switching: The basis of all advanced networks today is a reliance on fiber-optic connections because of their speed and capacity. But that also means researchers have to figure out how to build optical switches that can work faster and increase capacity on a given piece of fiber.

One of the most important advanced network projects in this area, Howe says, is the development of Wavelength Division Multiplexing. That technology sends many different sets of data along an optical fiber by assigning each one to a particular wavelength of light. It is similar to using different frequencies on a copper wire to handle various types of data, except that fiber optics are far faster and more versatile.

Distributed Applications: The original Internet and its successor, the NSFnet, allowed researchers to make use of the power of distant supercomputers. The advanced networks make it feasible to think about doing the same kind of work in the future without needing a single, expensive machine. By distributing a computing problem around the network, legions of smaller computers can devote unused processing time to solving the problem.

The idea isn't new. Hackers have used it to break encryption schemes; astronomers use it to check radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence; and a new dot-com relies on the scheme to help its corporate partners search for an AIDS vaccine.

But those and similar efforts today are "embarrassingly parallel problems," ones that can trivially be broken into small parts that can then be worked on in isolation, says Todd Needham, manager of the research programs group at Microsoft. For example, the SETI@home project, which searches for patterns in radio astronomy data, simply divides its massive data into chunks of a few hundred kilobytes. Each PC involved in the project takes a chunk at a time, runs the data through some equations and passes the results back to the astronomers.

Work being done on Internet2 involves how to put intelligence into the network itself to manage problems where things simply can't be divided into neat chunks. The network will be able to quickly rearrange itself, farm a part of the problem out to an available computer and coordinate the dynamics of the process. That would let researchers perform "pretty close to the full set of supercomputer applications today" on the network, Needham says.

Distance Instrument and Process Control: One of the most intriguing uses of the advanced backbones to researchers at both universities and government labs is the potential to control complex - and usually exceedingly expensive - instruments from long distances.

For example, take particle accelerators, enormous machines used by physicists to break matter down into its most fundamental bits and study them for clues to the basic rules of the universe. A new device is being constructed for this purpose at CERN, the Swiss facility where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. With advanced backbones and the ability to move the huge data that results to remote machines, CERN's accelerator and similar facilities can be used by scientists all over the world without forcing them to travel to the device itself.

"Scientists believe this is going to revolutionize physics," Strawn says.

Similarly, astronomers will be able to coordinate their use of telescopes around the world from their desktops, and computer scientists and other researchers will be able to command the fastest supercomputers from remote sites, or even in collaboration with other researchers at different institutions.

While that may not sound like a direct benefit to the public at large, experts say the same technology and techniques can be applied to remote medicine, perhaps at some time allowing re-mote surgery. That would bring the benefits of the best medical knowledge available to nearly any patient.

"Researchers and medical practitioners can have direct physical access to, say, an electron microscope located physically on the other side of the country," says Gordon Wishom, chief information officer at Georgia Institute of Technology. "There are a number of applications in that space that have been very important to researchers that can have a direct impact upon people's lives."

Security: The original Internet was never designed with security in mind - possibly because its users were all supposed to be cooperative, possibly because it was open only to government-approved users and possibly because nobody imagined hackers.

Getting It Right

With security as one of the key flaws in the commodity internet, researchers are busily using the advanced networks to figure out how to make stronger - and more modern - types of security ubiquitous.

"If you look at the basic concepts of public key cryptography, the most important conceptual breakthroughs happened over 20 years ago," says AT&T's Bellovin, one of the world's top computer security experts.

His work involves figuring out ways to provide encryption and authentication for sensitive traffic, and the creation of a network design in which every transmission is encoded and all Web sites and users hold a verifiable certificate proving they are who they say they are.

The advanced network research has even spawned more ambitious projects. Cerf, for example, heads a group based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., that is examining how to make the Net work on an interplanetary scale, so that spacecraft and, perhaps, humans on future missions will have a standardized and reliable method of communication with Mother Earth. The first satellite equipped with a prototype of the necessary software is slated to be launched this month, Cerf says.

And to critics who worry that things are making their way into the commercial sphere a bit too slowly, at least one researcher warns that you might want to let them get it done right instead of quickly.

"I hope it will be a couple of years before I'm operated on remotely," says Craig Labovitz, a research scientist at Microsoft.

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