THE NEXT NET:

New Improved Internet (Edward B. Driscoll, Jr., 10/08/2002, Tech Central Station)

The need for employees and entrepreneurs to telecommute from home has clearly grown in importance since the terrible events of September 11th, 2001. However, the type of work that can be done via telecommuting is being hampered by a bottleneck of the current maximum speed of today's connections to the Internet. For most users of the Internet, bandwidth has reached a temporary speed limit of somewhere between 56 kilobits a second, the maximum that dial-up modems can perform, and a few megabits per second, the speed of most 'high-speed' broadband cable modem, DSL, and satellite connections.

HDTV videoconferencing via the Internet is but one example of a tool that many businesses and entrepreneurs would welcome to reduce the amount of flying necessary to conduct business face to face. But the sender and receiver would each require bandwidth of at least 270 mbps, and preferably a lot more. For anyone who's downloaded and watched video over the Internet, it's clear that for a variety of reasons, the current Internet, wonderful for transmitting text, pretty good for transmitting audio and still images, just doesn't cut it when it comes to transmitting decent quality video. Those limitations that hamper video also slow a number of other applications.

Fortunately, help may be on the way. If the folks at Internet2 have their way, the current Internet will gradually be replaced by components they've developed and tested—a computer network that's faster, sleeker, stronger, able to leap over tall HDTV broadcasts in a single bandwidth.

Internet2 is a research and development consortium of over 190 universities, about 70 companies, and 40 other organizations that are using high-performance networks to test new technologies and deploy new applications.

Cool stuff from Mr. Driscoll. It had seemed like the aftermath of 9-11 was the natural time for videoconferencing to explode and for business travel to diminish, maybe permanently. This explains why it didn't and why it might in the future. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 8, 2002 11:10 PM