From 1996 to 1997 the number of adult Internet users in the U.S. doubled to between 40 and 50 million. Although the network to end all networks has been hailed as a bastion of instantaneous information, traffic on the superhighway has been slowing down recently.

Sluggish file transfers and Web browsing are constant occurrences on the Internet, from shutdowns on Harvard's own network to large network switch failures.

"What is available today is partially O.K. and also widely understood to be not good enough," said Steve D. Crocker, chief technology officer and co-founder of Cybercash. Crocker cited too much congestion and insufficient reliability as examples.

"There is a demand for much better reliability, much less congestion, much greater certainty," Crocker said.

In order to supply this increased demand, there are works for a new Internet in town: Internet 2.

As its name implies, Internet 2 is a second Internet. Technically, it is an upgrade to the network language that all computers on the Internet speak: TCP/IP.

Harvard was one of the founders of a consortium of more than 110 universities in the United States involved in creating Internet 2.

According to Scott O. Bradner, senior technical consultant for Harvard's University Information Systems, Internet 2 is a "platform for developing advanced, free, competitive applications which might demand a high bandwidth...or which make use of quality of service controls" that the commercial Internet cannot provide.

Bandwidth is the rate at which data is transferred across the Internet. It is analogous to the flow of water through a pipe. The more sophisticated the "pipe," the greater the speed.

Internet 2 will allow for high-bandwidth activities such as real-time video to take place with ease--activities unimagined in the early days of the Internet.

One of these advanced applications is distance learning--the live observation of classes from a remote location.

The current Internet is often too congested to reliably facilitate applications such as distance learning.

Bradner says that "quality of service controls" are those that prioritize data on the Internet.

"Now, all [Internet] traffic is treated equally; your e-mail message to your mother, your Web browsing, the Harvard president's message to the president of Yale," said Bradner, who served on the initial architecture committee of Internet 2 and has been active on its technical committee since then.

"In times of congestion, [the e-mails] will get discarded with equal probability," he added.

The controls would allow an area of bandwidth to be restricted for certain data.