Massive bandwidth may not be readily available to the average company, but ...

Imagine not having to worry about bandwidth. Imagine that you didn't have to concern yourself with the usual nightmares of wide-area networking, like poorly designed carrier networks that choke the performance out of your mission- critical transmissions. Imagine you could guarantee every user in your company the bandwidth they needed, anywhere in the country. Imagine there was so little latency that you didn't have to worry that a large file transfer would choke your company's pipes. What kinds of strategic applications would you be able to build?

Welcome to the world of advanced networking. This kind of capability not only exists today, it's already in production, connecting hundreds of sites nationwide. Remember Internet2? It was originally a collection of universities attempting to push the envelope for networking to see how a variety of communications problems could be overcome. Not only is it still around, but it's connecting more than 200 U.S. colleges, government sites—and now, corporations.

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Today, that network, known as Abilene, is a proving ground for high-bandwidth technologies. And we mean really high: A 2.5 gigabit-per-second cross-country backbone is being upgraded to 10 gigabits per second, with the goal of offering 100 megabits per second of fast-turnaround connectivity between every Abilene-connected desktop. The premise is simple: Make the network invisible so you can focus on other issues, like making applications actually work without bandwidth penalties. "If you get a sufficiently large quantitative leap in performance," says Greg Wood, communications director at Internet2, "you get to do your work in a qualitatively different way." John Jamison, a consulting engineer for research and education at Juniper Networks, agrees: "It's not just, 'What can I do with high bandwidth?' It's, 'What's possible when lots of people get high bandwidth?' "

A number of brand-name corporations— The Boeing Co., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Johnson & Johnson—are getting into the act as well, leveraging Internet2's fiber backbone for strategic research and development. Though many of these efforts are still focused on traditional R&D, it won't be long before a number of these bleeding-edge capabilities trickle down to the average company, supporting a range of business applications.

Applications
The proving ground for mega-bandwidth networks is in research and development. But there are real-world uses.

Advances in networking are typically driven by bleeding-edge users with appetites for bandwidth that can't be sated. Analysts and academics point to a variety of bandwidth-gobbling applications, typically falling into three categories.

The first is interactive real-time design, such as flight simulation and aerodynamic modeling, architectural and automobile design—virtually any application with thousands of variables that fluctuate from moment to moment. For example, Caterpillar Inc. takes a page out of Star Trek's "holodeck" to design equipment in a virtual reality room known as "The Cave," originally developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An engineer moves around in a small room wearing a head-mounted display that simulates a three-dimensional design of, say, a backhoe, peering inside the projection and determining what will and won't work before a single lump of modeling clay is cast. Only a network providing massive bandwidth can handle the sheer volume of data such an application requires.

The second group of mega-bandwidth uses involves gathering and moving around huge chunks of data, such as remote equipment manipulation, oceanographic and seismic sensing, and global data collection from field trials of products such as pharmaceuticals. The Gemini Observatories, twin telescopes perched above the 10,000-feet level in Chile and in Hawaii, can combine to provide a 360-degree view of the night sky. But coordinating the two telescopes has been impossible, and the altitude prevented some researchers from journeying there. Now academics from any Abilene-connected university can manipulate the telescopes via a pipe carrying a minimum of 600 megabits per second—without leaving their desks. The results in both cases: Better data, and research money goes to research, not travel.

But the poster child for next-generation networks has always been desktop videoconferencing. We've been hearing for years that we'll have seamless real-time conferencing any day now. Yet high-quality bidirectional video and audio are tremendous bandwidth hogs, clogging local and wide-area networks alike, and few companies can make the case that precious bandwidth resources should be chewed up by an application few see as mission critical.

There's a solution: Argonne National Laboratory's Access Grid Node is a bundle of technologies that can turn a conference room into a virtual meeting venue straight out of a sci-fi movie, allowing up to 30 real-time high-quality video links from around the world to be displayed on screens in real time.

The challenge for corporations, however, is that few are ready to make the investment to expand the high-bandwidth connections in their R&D shops to include their production networks. It's going to take new strategic applications to make it worth upping the performance of its overall network.

In The Corporation
As the drivers of high-bandwidth commercialization become clearer, bleeding-edge technologies are slowly migrating to the corporation.

The process for infusing technologies developed through initiatives like Internet2 into products you'll actually be able to buy is anything but direct. It's dependent on the commercial savvy of the universities involved and the relentless focus of startups that can navigate the often-unwieldy process of taking technologies out of the lab.

Take, for example, Chicago-based InSORS Integrated Communications, which has built a commercial version of Argonne's video collaboration product and named it the InSORS Grid. Customers such as Ford and Motorola Inc. have established videoconferencing nodes by leveraging high-bandwidth connections that allow users to conduct real-time discussions comfortably. Brian Gleason, InSORS' director of business development, says his company consolidated Argonne's four servers into one, integrated cameras and displays, and added a gateway for companies that can't support IP multicasting—the ability to broadcast packets to multiple recipients. According to Gleason, traditional low-bandwidth videoconferencing gets only 4 percent to 8 percent use, but high-bandwidth "immersive" videoconferencing rapidly gets infused into the customer's way of communicating internally. "Once they get a real feel for doing this kind of stuff," says Gleason, "it's just a matter of time before it becomes a part of their regular culture."