But Bradner cautioned that the system would not be available for personal use by students.

"If you have a girlfriend at Cornell, and you want to use the video phone, you will not be able to reserve bandwidth for that," Bradner said.

The principle behind Internet 2 is that the participating universities will connect to each other via a very large High Speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS).

The vBNS is the backbone of Internet 2 and is capable of data transmission speeds up to 622 megabits per second (Mbps). Transfer rates to student dorms currently have a maximum of 10Mbps.

The vBNS is contracted out to MCI by the National Science Foundation (NSF)--one of the principal parties involved in forming the current Internet.

In order to take advantage of the high speeds of the vBNS, universities are building GigaPoPs.

"A GigaPoP is a nice piece of jargon," Bradner said. "In reality...it's a service interconnection point where [institutions] connect together in high speed networking."

Beginnings

The Internet was first created in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 40 years ago. Then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of the Department of Defense.

ARPA's goal was to improve military use of technology by examining how computers could be used together.

This network research became known as ARPANET. By 1969, the first computer on the network was established at UCLA.

Crocker was a graduate student at UCLA at the time.

"I just happened to be at the right place at the right time," he said.

Crocker was part of a group that determined what protocols--the network language--ARPANET would use and to what extent.

He described their philosophy as one which promoted a layered approach to building the network.