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From www.nytimes.com:
October 7, 1996 University Internet Proposed By LAWRENCE M. FISHER A group of 34 research universities agreed last week to create a new national network for higher education, to be called Internet II, which will offer higher speeds and more reliable service than the current Internet. As described in the Oct. 11 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the new network is intended to deliver the vastly higher speeds needed to allow the simultaneous transmission of voice, video and data. Internet II would give researchers the bandwidth they need to enable distance learning, digital libraries and on-line collaborative research. The organizers of Internet II say its advanced capabilities will ultimately become available on the existing Internet as commercial service providers find ways to offer more bandwidth -- a bigger pipeline to transmit a high volume of information -- at attractive prices. The research universities have agreed to establish and finance a new organization, with membership fees to help create the network. They also hope to get financing from telecommunications and computer companies, as well as from the federal government. "What we're trying to do is solve a whole bunch of technical problems having to do with making the Internet operate at a higher level of functionality," said Michael Roberts, who has been working on the Internet II proposal and is vice president of Educom, a consortium of nearly 600 colleges and 100 companies that promote computing in higher education. "What everybody needs is something on the order of 10 times more bandwidth." According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the decision to move forward with the plan was made during a meeting of campus technology officers in Chicago last week. Computer science specialists from Pennsylvania State and Stanford universities and the Universities of California, Chicago, Michigan and North Carolina will play leading roles in the network's development.