Internet Deuce

The possibilities seem endless when Doug Van Houweling, founding president and CEO of Internet2, talks about the future of connectivity.

"Moving in a direction where this business of virtual presence is going to be a very big deal," he says. "One example, which I think is coming, and we're already seeing in some parts of the country, is remote medical care."

He says that there'll be a time when people won't have to actually go to the doctor for a check up, he'll come to you. Virtual house calls – all through videoconferencing.

"I expect a time when people don't have to go to a clinic," he says. "They'll just go into their family room or office or bedroom, sit down in front of their personal computer with a camera, plug into a USB port with a package of stuff to get blood pressure readings and have a conversation with the doc."

Van Houweling believes advance networks for healthcare are going to be an intrinsic part of our future.

And it's not just him, either. The Federal Communications Commission is jumping on board, too. Van Houweling explains how the commission is in the process of launching a pilot program to fund and expand high performance networking across the United States. In particular, the FCC is interested in how futuristic medical endeavors like these can reach rural populations.

Ann Arbor meets The Jetsons

Though innovation is no stranger to Ann Arbor and the University Of Michigan, Van Houweling's Internet2 could be a global technological game changer. Headquartered here in The Deuce, the company is a not-for-profit organization that provides extremely high performance networking capabilities to its hundreds of members – mostly Universities and large scientific organizations but also a few corporate, government, and other non-profit agencies.

So, what is Internet2? A good analogy is that where the current commercial Internet is stop-and-go traffic, clogged with stop signs and red lights, Internet2 is the autobahn, traveling at speeds faster than your new Mustang could ever go.

The appeal, of course, is that these organizations are able to transmit enormous amounts of data – often times in the form of HD videoconferencing – back-and-forth seamlessly. Something commercial Internet would never be able to do.

The organization started back in 1996 with three employees but now, boasting a $40 million annual budget, employs more than 80, with nearly 50 working in the Ann Arbor area.

Internet2, fittingly named, was born after the original Internet went commercial. The first Internet, funded by the National Science Foundation, was created as a tool for higher education and called NFSNet. It linked university mainframes and libraries for research. After the commercial aspect of the information superhighway was realized and jumped from the fingertips of academia to the clumsy paws of the public, a void was created for these universities. Mainly because commercial Internet suppliers quickly found out that they couldn't really handle the vertical explosiveness of the net.

"[The corporate community] couldn't respond to the higher education communities' need for really high performance networking," Van Houweling says. "They discovered that our needs were different, which they weren't prepared to provide.  And they didn't really feel we should continue to beat on them. Plus they were so busy trying to cope with the present [demands] of the Internet that they were having trouble dealing with the future of the Internet."

The future of the Internet is rooted in the past

Ann Arbor was the logical home, he says, because of the deep roots already established by a local networking organization called Merit, which has been around since the mid-60s. Yes, networking in the 60s. Whodathunk?

"Wayne State University, Michigan State, and the U of M wanted to see if they could connect their mainframes and needed someone outside of the universities to bring this together," Don Welch President and CEO of Merit says. "We were the first ones to do something like that."

He continues: "Everyone claims to have invented the Internet, but really, we did, in the sense that we helped build these connections with NSFNet, who then turned it over to the commercial world."

Through Merit (Van Houweling was their Board Chairman), Internet2 was able to establish a base of expertise. It not only seemed natural to stick around Ann Arbor, but Van Houweling has been a resident since 1984.

Merit's relationship to Inernet2, now, is like an umbrella. Internet2 is at the top, the backbone network that runs throughout the entire U.S. while Merit is a regional hub for Internet2's networking capabilities. Merit takes care of Michigan and a few adjacent states. If the regional community wants to transfer data or connect to the backbone – and if they are here in Michigan – they contact Merit who works out the logistics.

Technologically, Internet2 is about three to five years ahead of most connections people use today. That might not sound like a lot but when you think back to five years ago when AOL dial-up service was the norm, you get a fair analogy for where Internet2's capabilities lie. It's a follow-the-leader type thing. Internet2 cuts through the ice, lays the groundwork, then commercial Internet follows. As they follow, Internet2 remains five years ahead, cutting more ice.

"Typically Internet2 connectivity, compared to commercial connectivity, is about 1000 times [faster]," Van Houweling says. "And you can expect that to continue."

Van Houweling's company, again, just went through another upgrade, increasing speed by a factor of 10.

"Internet2 replaced its national network just last year," he says. "At the time we were operating at 10-gigabits nationally, now we're at 100 with the capability to go up to 400."

That's 400 billion bits per second! Even more impressive, Internet2 is working on connecting U.S. scientists with its European counterpart to transmit a trillion bits a day – called a terabit – from an accelerator lab in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The numbers become so large it's hard to wrap your brain around them.

With Internet2 capabilities, Van Houweling says, ten terabits would take about two hours. To do something like that with anything other than high-performance networking would be infeasible. It could take ten times as long, he says, and, that's assuming no one else is using the Internet at that same time.

To infinity and beyond...

Other than the universities, which is where Internet2 does most of its work, the scientific community is also starting to see the implications for the network's evolving speeds and data transfer.

Take astronomy, for instance. A building-sized radio telescope's coverage is typically a few miles wide. Not much when you consider the vastness of the galaxy. Through Internet2, however, these huge telescopes can be linked together to retrieve and integrate more data, from a wider area, faster.

"Standing on the earth looking at a star hundreds of light years away through a radio telescope that is a couple miles wide doesn't give you a lot of resolving power," Van Houweling says. "Suppose you could tie two radio telescopes together, one in the United States and one in Europe. Now you got a big base, now you've got some resolution."

Internet2, with its ever-growing capacities for information and speed, offers atronomers enormous mapping possibilities, Van Houweling explains. "And so, we use the network to tie those two telescope together to a correlator so that they become one large virtual telescope."

In the tech world the distant future is a mere two years away. To predict five years out is a stretch. Ten years, an impossibility. Innovation, these days, moves at the speed of light. However, Van Houweling can attest to one thing.

"We fully expect to stay in Ann Arbor," he states. "This is a good place for this type of enterprise. The State gave us a grant for this building, and we're wanted here."

With enough space, enough speed, and enough power, maybe the Jetsons life style isn't that far off.

"It's 2008, go back five years to 2003 and look at where we were," Welch says. "I heard someone say if you want to know where we are going to be in five years, look back 20 and that's where the technological change will be."