¶ … Internet 2 and IPv6? Internet2 is collaboration among more than two hundred universities, industry and government to develop networking and advanced applications for learning and research. The primary objects of Internet2 are to create a leading edge network for the national research community, enable new Internet applications, and to ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community. Because learning and research often requires real-time multimedia and high-bandwidth interconnections, Internet2 is adding the network infrastructure to support these applications. Internet2 is not a separate physical network and is not intended to replace the Internet, but its collaborators will share with developments with the Internet and other networks as appropriate.

Abilene is a high-performance backbone network used by the Internet2 community. The Abilene network supports the Internet2 by providing an effective interconnect among the regional networking aggregation points called gigaPoPs, pioneered by Internet2 universities. Abilene helps Internet2 members develop and deploy new applications more quickly and more broadly. The first transcontinental path in a nationwide Internet2 Abilene backbone network is already in service. It provides Internet2 member universities and research centers access to networking capabilities such as line-speed native IPv6 (discussed later) and scalable multicasting required by advanced network applications.

Quality of Service (Qos) is the concept that transmission rates, error rates, and other transmission factors can be measured, improved and guaranteed in advance. Transmitting high-bandwidth video and multimedia information with dependability is difficult....

Internet2 members plan to use QoS tools to allow participants to reserve and use bandwidth for events or in certain time periods.
The following represent some of the exciting possibilities for applications that Interenet2 will make possible:

Distributed learning modules: Students will be able to learn any-time/any-place and own the learning process to a degree that is currently not feasible using traditional forms of instruction over the Internet. This flexibility will be somewhere in between the highly-structured classroom and the total lack of structure usually associated with surfing the Internet. From an instructor viewpoint, Internet 2 will open up the possibility of browsing the Web for potential instructional materials in a coherent and productive way, previewing those materials, incorporating them into courses, and making those courses available to students.

New ways to envision and retrieve information: Today's text-oriented models of information structure could be replaced by interactive pictures of information structure (compare a table of contents with illustrations of interlinked and explodable forms, for example). With Internet2's high-bandwidth connections, experiments in such information visualization will be possible.

Virtual environment sharing: Sometimes referred to as tele-immersion, participants in teleconferences could share the perception that everyone was in the same physical place, with virtual models of shared work objects such as architectural models or multimedia storyboards. You would be able to see yourself with others in a far-away conference room, talking and perhaps manipulating objects in the room.

Virtual laboratory: A virtual laboratory would allow scientists…