The Second Coming of the Internet
Jonathan Sreekumaran
The transfer experiment was done between the Geneva, Switzerland home of CERN and Pasadena, California, where Caltech is based - a distance of approximately 15,766 kilometres. Furthermore, this is the first time the 100-petabit metre per second mark has been broken. One petabit equals 1,000,000,000,000,000 bits.
The Internet2, as its known, is presently available to 200 odd member institutions. The Internet2 community has developed a high performance network called Abilene. An important goal for the Abilene network is to provide a backbone network for the internet2.
The Internet2 has established a content-based traffic program to study the performance of advanced content traffic, including video, audio and multimedia streams, as well as advanced uses of standard content such as programs.
Microsoft also created 2.5Gbps link from its Windows Update site to the high performance Abilene backbone so that users at the 200 odd Internet2 member institutions could download Service Pack 2 for Windows XP at 'blinding speed'.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------