Researchers working to build the super Internet of the future just got an early Easter present in the form of their fastest data pipe yet.
Earlier this week, MCI WorldCom flipped the switch on a new trunk of its Very High Performance Backbone Network Service, or vBNS, between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
While the average company network shuttles data around at speeds from 10 to 100 megabits per second, the new link between the California cities will move it at 2.5 gigabits per second. A gigabit is equal to 1,000 megabits.
"This is an important milestone in support of next-generation internetworking," said Internet founding father Vint Cerf in a statement. Cerf is now MCI WorldCom's senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology. "VBNS supports the exploration of advanced applications by the research and education community, some of which may one day become commonplace on the public Internet."
The new link serves as a kind of test bed where researchers hope develop the high-speed applications of the future.
The controlled network environment of the vBNS allows researchers to guarantee certain levels of bandwidth. This provides a pure environment to fine-tune multicast applications, the next generation of the Internet Protocol, or IP6, and Quality of Service classes.
That research will ultimately migrate to the existing Internet. But that will be a slow process, since the public Internet is not uniformly administered like the vBNS.
MCI WorldCom is building the network in a public-private partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Participants in two primary national high-speed networking research projects -- Internet2 and the Next Generation Internet -- currently use the vBNS as their cross-country pipeline.
The vBNS already reaches most major US metropolitan areas -- New York, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Houston, and beyond. The bulk of those links run at speeds of 622 Mbps.
This minimum speed and performance limit enables critical applications to run that would be nearly impossible on the open Internet. If applications such as remote surgery are to become practical using global networks, delays in throughput are intolerable.
To begin deploying IP6 on the Internet, for example, the owners of all the individual networks that make up the Net must upgrade their those networks.
First projects for the new vBNS link include testing the stability of data flow under heavy traffic conditions and exploring advanced monitoring techniques.
