The brief moment of euphoria when the university community could relax and take credit for building the Internet has passed.
The warm glow induced by reading about the marvels of networking on the front pages has been replaced by a "morning after" headache of over-ambitious promises that a privatized Internet would meet the complex needs of higher education.
The public, even the learned public of campus communities, is fickle. Like all Americans, it has been raised on a diet of technology-based products that change and improve constantly. Especially for those of us tied professionally to information technology, the level of expectation is very high. No product in history has matched the price performance curve of the microcomputer over the past 20 years. We are burdened daily with one-liners from leading industry figures suggesting that "MIPS are free," "bits are free," and even "information wants to be free."
The challenge to be addressed in the next generation of university networks has several dimensions. First and most important, we must re-create and sustain a leading edge network capability for the national research community. For a number of years beginning in 1987, the network services of NSFnet were unequaled anywhere else. But the privatization of that network and the frequent congestion of its commercial replacement have deprived many faculty of the network capability needed to support world class research. This unintended result has had a significant negative impact on the university research community.
Second, we need to refocus network development efforts more directly on enabling a new generation of applications that fully exploit the capabilities of broadband networks - media integration, interactivity, real-time collaboration - to name a few. This work is essential if new priorities within higher education for support of distance education, lifelong learning, school-to-work and related efforts are to be fulfilled.
Third, the effort to re-establish a leading edge network infrastructure must be carefully coordinated with work to iron out the bugs in existing campus production networks, which are still growing rapidly and whose users have a wealth of needs.
Over the past two years, Educom has sponsored and participated in a series of workshops - in San Francisco, Monterey, Ann Arbor and Colorado Springs - to define requirements and lay out a game plan for the next-generation university network. Not surprisingly, given the complexity of the issues, the discussions and debates at these meetings have frequently diverged as much as they have converged. However, in recent weeks, with assistance from our friends and colleagues in the federal research agencies and in industry, a proposal has emerged for a three- to five-year project - named Internet II - whose goals embrace the three objectives outlined above.
The fundamental purpose of the Internet II project is to bring focus, energy and partnership to the next major stage of development of the Internet in academia. It is a highly technical project with challenging deliverables and thus not for every school. However, as new applications and their supporting new network services successfully pass through the "proof of concept" stage of development, they will immediately become available to the wider Internet audience. In fact, an emphasis on rapid transfer of technology is a major feature of the Internet II project.
Ten years ago, the university networking community embarked on a risky project with government and industry partners to move the Internet from research labs to all of research and education. As we enter the second decade of the worldwide Internet, the challenge to infuse the network with a new generation of advanced technology is great - but so are the rewards. It's time to take up the challenge.