Recently seen on NANOG:
Internet II, if it happens, would be Higher-Ed's intranet.
Sounds great. It all sounded great until it got to the part about "federal funding". I, for one, have a problem with my tax dollars going towards some professor being able to gawk at another professor in a videoconference.
One could easily name it "NSFNET V2", and it sounds as if they have declared lack of confidence in ISPs to solve their problems. If I were one of them, I might reason, "Why should I pay my lack-of-supprt, peering-point-packet-saturated, overcommitted, BGP-flapping, poor- cooperation, no-bandwidth-reservation ISP, when I can spend my money on this new group focussed on this higher level of service? I don't care if it costs more; it's not like I'm paying for the extra level of service directly. I want to move my research traffic onto this network before Bob's big Internet death happens." If anything, it shows that there's a need for a higher level of service than what's being provided to everyone jumping onto the Internet bandwagon. Who pays for it is arbitrary - whether it's the government or a Fortune 100 company, someone who sees value in it will pay for it. There's no question that service is good enough for the masses - watch them flee online service providers - but now there's a niche market for the quality of service once provided through NSFNET. At a recent Usenix, I attended a tutorial on Win95/NT programming (from a Unix perspective) where the lecturer commented a couple times, "One can complain all they want about how Windows is inferior to Unix, but there are those who see it as an opportunity to write software for Windows that provides the functinality they see lacking and make lots of money in the process." (It's not a direct quote, just my interpretation.) Likewise, people can complain that yet someone else is going to have a federally funded network, or as a hypothetical network service provider or telecommunications company I could fill the need by making a more reliable and feature-rich backbone to connect to and then take the money of the people who were going to build it anyway. I think some of the newer and/or larger ISPs are seeing this need, "Intranet" (a virtual private Internet begging the phrase "X.25 - the next generation"), and you might see one of them get the contract to serve what these universities want. BTW: I noticed after typing that this thread belongs on com-priv, yes? -- Eric Ziegast