Monday, October 1, 2001

Abilene Network Expands Beyond Research Universities By FLORENCE OLSEN Abilene, the high-speed network backbone built for the Internet2 project by the nation's largest research universities, is being opened up for use by thousands of public and independent colleges, community colleges, libraries, museums, and elementary and secondary schools. A maturing of high-speed technologies played a part in the policy change. Until recently, the large universities that created Abilene were reluctant to open the network beyond the membership of the Internet2 consortium, says Jeff Ogden, the associate director for high-performance networking at Merit Network. Merit is a not-for-profit organization in Michigan that provides statewide network services to universities that are Internet2 members and to some that are not. As time has passed, Mr. Ogden says, Internet2 members "have gained confidence in how [Abilene] works and what the traffic is going to be." Merit operates both as a state network and as a gigaPOP, or hub for high-speed network access to Abilene. For some time, Merit and other gigaPOPs had pressured the research universities within Internet2 to expand access to Abilene, Mr. Ogden says. The gigaPOPs, he adds, "have been in this awkward situation of providing superior Internet2 access to some of their schools and not to others, even though some of the others wanted it." In March, Internet2 members changed their restrictive policy. "Some would say we are late in doing this," says Laurie L. Burns, the director of member activities for Internet2. Since then, 13 state education networks have been linked to Abilene. The education networks are in California, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. The networks were permitted access to Abilene as "sponsored education group participants," a new category of membership. More will soon be connected. In August, Merit finished connecting all 13 of Michigan's publicly supported universities to Internet2. The not-for-profit Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, known as CENIC, is still in the midst of a huge expansion of its high-speed infrastructure, which will bring Abilene within reach of all elementary and secondary schools in the state's 58 counties. Abilene itself is a gateway to the worldwide infrastructure of high-speed research and education networks. Students and faculty members who use Abilene gain access to many of the advanced networks operated by the U.S. government and to international networks as well. Central Michigan University is one of the institutions recently connected to Abilene through the Merit Network. Gongzhu Hu, a professor of computer science there who is an expert in databases, wants to collaborate with other database specialists at Internet2 and overseas institutions to create a prototype of a virtual database. The prototype will use education, financial, and travel information extracted from World Wide Web pages. The collaboration -- with researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the University of Florida -- will eventually require a high volume of data transfer to Central Michigan from Web sites all around the world. Some networking officials predict that new traffic across Abilene from the state education networks may grow relatively slowly at first. Many institutions on those networks are in "a chicken or egg" situation, says Tom West, the president and executive director of CENIC. Some places know what they want to do with Abilene, but they can't get started until they get faster local networks. Other places can connect at Internet2 speeds, but they haven't had time to plan research or educational exchanges that require those speeds. "I'm excited about it," says Ken Schindler, executive director of information-technology services at Saginaw Valley State University, in Michigan. Over the summer, the university installed a faster central network switch and brought the entire campus network up to Internet2 standards. Mr. Schindler says the university needs some time now to figure out how it will use the new capacity. "The switch is here, but it's not doing a whole lot," he says. Networking officials anticipate that the most common research use of Abilene among newly connected institutions will be among distant colleagues and research groups using high-quality, high-speed, interactive videoconferencing. Collaboration exchanges that occur today with some difficulty over the Internet -- or that don't occur at all -- will be experienced with high fidelity over the Internet2 backbone. Ferris State University will use the superior videoconferencing capacity of Abilene "to do better supervision" of its Michigan College of Optometry students when they are in clinical rotations and residencies on the campus of Michigan State University, says Dale Hobart, manager of instructional technology at Ferris State. Michigan State is a regular institutional member of Internet2. Activities that move from the much-slower commercial Internet to Abilene will benefit considerably. Two such activities are the University of California System's advanced-placement distance-education program and CalState Teach, an online teacher-certification program offered by California State University. "With more network capacity and wider potential distribution, those resources will be used more extensively," says Mr. West, of CENIC. An Internet2 educational committee has formed to collaborate with educators about advanced network technologies, curricula, and policies. "We need to understand which Internet2 technologies add value and are relevant to the broader education community, and which ones may not be," says Louis B. Fox, the vice provost for educational partnerships and learning technologies at the University of Washington at Seattle, who is one of the leaders of the committee. The Rhode Island School for the Deaf and the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf in Maine are beginning discussions about the use of Internet2 videoconferencing technologies, says George Loftus, executive director of the Ocean State Higher Education, Economic Development & Administrative Network, in Rhode Island. "I have this little dream in the back of my head," he says, "about setting up national deaf debates where deaf students from high schools around the country could be part of a debate team, because the technology's now there to allow them to communicate." Ms. Burns, of Internet2, describes current members' "if you build it, they will come" way of thinking. "We're looking for that kind of wave coming out of the community colleges and the master's and baccalaureate institutions of higher education," she says, as Abilene becomes a new field of dreams. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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