'I'm optimistic about what will happen in five years as a result of experiments in new services.'

EE Times: What is the Internet2?
Steven Corbato: I view the Internet2 environment as a microcosm of the future general Internet, where you have people connected, either at the 100-Mbit or the gigabit-per-second level. Essentially, we have one or two orders-of-magnitude greater bandwidth available in the campus Internet2 space than we currently see in the home environment. So I think that's what spawns the application innovation, the experimentation with high performance, with videoconferencing.

Over the period of 1998 to 2000, we demonstrated that a shared IP network is certainly capable of supporting multiple gigabit-per-second flows. Abilene and some of our other test networks have been able to support flows up around 7 Gbits/s, transcontinentally. We never thought that would be possible. We're interested in pushing the bar technically.

EET: What's the outlook for upgrading the core of the Internet to 40 and 100 Gbits/s?
Corbato: We have a high-end node that can transmit data with a 10-Gbit Ethernet interface. That line rate is equivalent to the best optical circuit you can get. We are in contact with several companies to bring in higher-speed technologies, and we're trying to do everything we can to accelerate their availability. We would love to get 40G or higher into our network in the 2007 to 2009 time frame.

EET: What opportunities do you see in next-generation Internet projects?
Corbato: If we look at the higher-education community, all told right now we hold an ag­gregate of approximately 30,000 route miles of dark fiber. About a third of that is in the Na­tion­al LambdaRail Initiative, and the remainder is in regional networks. So there's a lot of capability for innovation in network architecture and in developing new services, because we basically own the network down to the glass. I'm actually very optimistic about what will happen over the next five years, as a result of the experimentation in the new services.

EET: What's the outlook for a move to IP Version 6 to handle wired and wireless users?
Corbato: We're encouraged to see activity in the federal space now, and not only within the Department of Defense. From our standpoint, v6 is important, particularly because of the preservation of the end-to-end Internet architecture, while supporting a much larger number of hubs. [In academia there's a] growing number of wireless users—and the emergence of wireless sensor networks, where research groups in a number of disciplines are beginning to employ a very high number of low-cost sensors to do measurement, whether it's for weather, biological detection, seismic studies or ecological observation. That's one of the things that drives interest in IPv6. Hopefully, that will spill over into the commercial community as well. I don't know the total number of Internet hosts in the United States; I would guess it's on the order of 100 million. That's an awesome upgrade task.