BlogHer - A Parallel Internet - Comments

Access to the internet will change

Virginia DeBolt — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:12:26 -0500

You're right, Going Like Sixty, and the lobbies for the big money interests are winning their battle. They've influenced the Department of Justice, which recently made news by saying that net neutrality was not an issue. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/59222.html is just one article about it. Basically the DOJ told the FCC that charging more for select high bandwidth situations was just fine.

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Access to the internet will change

GoingLikeSixty — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:36:56 -0500

Thanks, I didn't know about nlr until I read your post.
This is where I think the internet movers and shakers are missing the boat. They all seemed to be missing the fact that the internet as we know it today will change.
TV stations have already taken a position against allow free bandwidth to be used for high speed access. The National Association of Broadcasters has a good lobby in D.C.
The telecos also have a great lobby and want more so they can compete with TV. Where does this leave the average consumer? Who lobbies for us?

Actually,

Virginia DeBolt — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 10:25:56 -0500

although I saw the organizational websites for these networks, I don't know how an average person not in a university (or military) setting could make use of one.

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http://first50.wordpress.com/

So I'm assuming these new nets are inter-operable?

Kim Pearson — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:38:33 -0500

Of course, they must be -- or else you couldn't have seen the websites right? That says something about how far we've come in terms of standardization, right? I go back to the '80s at Bell Labs when they were developing UNIX on DARPANET, myself. I wonder whether there is some sort of central registry of these private nets, and whether there are still questions to be worked out in terms of interoperability and security.

Thanks for this, Virginia. Yet another reasons why you are one of my gurus.

Kim

BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|

ARPNET, etc

Virginia DeBolt — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:21:19 -0500

Sorry I didn't get into the slow connections from the early days in my post. I know there are lots of early adopters like yourself with memories of those times. I was more taken aback by the thought of how many high speed networks there are out there it the wild, for the purpose of who-knows-what, that weren't common knowledge.

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http://first50.wordpress.com/

Not one of those networks..

debra roby — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 09:47:25 -0500

When I began on the internet, it was through an experimental (at the time) community-oriented, non-commercial network offered by Case Western: the first of the community freenet systems:Cleveland FreeNet.

In the early 90s it offered: email, IRC, usenet and CFN-only groups, FTP and more. Everything but www. Everything text only. They had 6 servers for the whole community, so access was limited to an hour/connection, though you could dial in as many times as you liked (the kids at the university were wired in and didn't have the connection challenges of the community). We community users were talented at working the phone line, as it usually took 10-50 attempts before you'd connect.

It was slower than "The Slowskis"...sometimes taking a full hour to log in and read one email message... but it was a great introduction to an online world. The habit of staying online for an hour then doing something else stuck for more than a decade after I switched to a commercial provider. The community freenet system still exists in many cities, but, sadly, Case took theirs offline several years ago.

Debra
A Stitch In Time
Deb's Daily Distractions

A Parallel Internet

Virginia DeBolt — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 08:44:36 -0500

Suppose you'd been living in America for the last 15 years and just found out who Hillary Clinton is. That's the way I feel about National LambdaRail. I've been moving around in the tech and education worlds for a long time, but I'd never heard of this. I'm suffering from a sense of "how could I not know about this?"

I read a press release from the National Navajo Tribal Council. Press releases from the Native American nations in New Mexico where I live are commonplace, that wasn't what caught my eye. The press release was about something called the Internet to the Hogans program and mentioned a type of Internet called National LambdaRail.

Council Delegate Leonard Tsosie Convened the 10th Internet to the Hogans meeting featuring The National Lambda Rail Agreement between the University of New Mexico and Navajo Technical College.

The Navajo Technical College is in Crownpoint, about 170 miles northwest of Albuquerque where UNM is located. Crownpoint is surrounded by mountains and has limited access to telecommunications services. The article explained that The National LambdaRail Agreement gave Crownpoint access to a second Internet system that runs parallel to the well-known World Wide Web.

As I began looking around for for information about this, I was reminded that the World Wide Web is not the Internet. It's merely a piece of the Internet. We see a public, well-known and commercial side of the Internet on the WWW. But there is a lot going on behind that screen.

The National LambdaRail website lists a huge number of participants, all universities. It describes its mission as,

National LambdaRail is advancing the research, clinical, and educational goals of members and other institutions by establishing and maintaining a unique nationwide network infrastructure that is owned and controlled by the U.S. research community.

The description of what National LambdaRail is all about at the site is pretty technical. It was built from the ground up using fiber optics. So I turned to Wikipedia in hopes of clarification.

National LambdaRail is a high-speed national computer network in the United States that runs over fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental Ethernet network. The name is shared by the organization of research institutions that developed the network, and, to date, plans to continue developing it. LambdaRail is similar to the Abilene Network, but LambdaRail permits deeper experimentation than Abilene does.

It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts, but is also not intended to be a service network, but to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with next-generation large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with Abilene and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. This gives universities more control to use the network for these research projects.

I'd knew of Internet2, another university based high-speed, fiber optic network, so that news wasn't a shock. I learned that the Abilene Network is a creation of Internet2 with over 220 educational institutions parrticpating.

All three networks are used by universities for research and have corporate sponsors such as Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Comcast. Are there other networks that run parallel to the World Wide Web?

There are several military based networks running parallel to the WWW. In an article about the history of the Internet, Wikipedia mentions the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), the secret-level SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) and JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System) for top secret and above.

I tried searching on a number of different terms and couldn't find any other parallel networks. I don't think I was using the proper keywords, because I didn't even find the networks I talked about above by searching, nor did I find any that I haven't already mentioned. Are there more? I'd like to know.