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.

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.

"We wanted a framework that could grow over time as people developed new applications," he said.

By 1972, the first e-mail program was invented by Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), which recently merged with GTE. Until two weeks ago, BBN was Harvard's Internet service provider. The University upgraded its link and switched providers to AT&T.

Ten years later, ARPA established the current language of the Internet, TCP/IP.

Separate from ARPANET, the National Science Foundation (NSF) built NSFNET in 1986, comprised of five supercomputers that served as the Internet's backbone until the Internet was privatized earlier this decade.

According to Crocker, "NSFNET was really just an extension of the ARPANET with a lot of other technology thrown in."

Making the Internet's early growth seem sluggish, NSFNET was capable of speeds known as T1--about 25 times those of the original three years later.

Within another three years, the backbone had a capacity dubbed T3--700 times faster than the original.

But it is, in part, the limits of this backbone that has prompted efforts to increase, yet again, the speed of the Internet.

Not the Only One

But Internet 2 is not the only attempt being made to speed up the Internet. It is being led primarily by universities, while the federal government has its own plan to upgrade the Internet, known as the "Next Generation Internet" (NGI).

Similar to the origins of ARPANET, the NGI will begin with a focus on research universities, national labs and military applications.

The same agencies that were involved in the conception and evolution of the original Internet, will be spearheading the NGI. These agencies include the NSF, the organization formerly known as ARPA, NASA and the Department of Education.

The initiative's three goals are to get research sites connected at speeds from 100 to 1000 times faster than at present, promote new network technology experimentation and enable development of software with direct national application, especially defense.

For example, the NGI will be able to transmit the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in under one second, and defense agencies will be able to coordinate data from multiple satellites in order to gain "information dominance."

"NGI has been heavily confused with the vBNS and Internet 2," Bradner said.

Actually, the aspect of the NGI which targets increased connection rates by a factor of 100 uses Internet 2's vBNS backbone.

However, the two projects have separate functions.

Internet 2 is focused on providing a separate academic Internet for universities. The NGI is looking at new technologies that can improve the use-and amount of bandwidth, said Don M. Heath, president and CEO of the Internet Society--a non-governmental organization concerned with the legal, ethical, social and political evolution of the Internet.

Internet 2 is "really the universities' trying to recreate the sort of private Internet they enjoyed during the first years of our existence," Heath said.

To the contrary, Bradner said, "This is not 'the universities are going to go away and play in a corner.' You can't go home again."

Either way, Heath predicted that the Internet 2 and any further versions developed by universities would eventually be folded into the NGI.

"I think once the [NGI] has the capability to deliver what people want in the form of bandwidth, and availability, and responsiveness, and performance, etc., then the need [for a separate academic Internet] will go away," he said.

For both projects, the "concept is a protocol that would scale worldwide and allow unfragmented connectivity. And that's key," Heath said.

Internet 2@Harvard

Harvard is currently developing, along with M.I.T. and Boston University (B.U.), a Boston area GigaPoP.

Each of the schools received a $350,000 grant from the NSF toward building the GigaPoP.

The University's connection to the GigaPoP will allow anyone at Harvard to notice improved connectivity to other Internet 2/vBNS sites.

Initially, the schools will have two T3 (about 45Mbps) connections to the GigaPoP, but this is expandable.

Also, other local universities will be able to connect to Internet 2 via the Boston area GigaPoP, which is not located in any one place, but rather distributed among the three universities.

B.U. and Harvard have connections to the vBNS, while M.I.T. has a two links: one to Harvard and one to B.U.

This improvement will be entirely transparent to the Harvard campus Internet user, according to Bradner.

Initially, the ability to reserve space will be available only to researchers.

For both the University and Internet users in general Internet 2 and the NGI will mean vast improvements in service offered on society's newest medium.

"First of all, the Internet has reached the point where enough people are connected that people who aren't connected are on the outside," Crocker said.

"The main thing is that there's going to be a certain amount of heat coming from that part of the economy," he added. "People should get a scorecard and watch the program."

Addressing concerns by some observers that Harvard and other universities might be receding from the main Internet, Bradner said, "you can't go back to an environment where the Internet was small, and it just connected a few universities. Internet 2 is not changing the fundamental way that Harvard will interact with the world.