Internet2 provides the U.S. research and education community with a network that satisfies their bandwidth-intensive requirements. The network itself is a dynamic, robust and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network. It furnishes a 100 Gbit/s network backbone to more than 210 U.S. educational institutions, 70 corporations and 45 non-profit and government agencies.
The objectives of the Internet2 consortium are:
Developing and maintaining a leading-edge network.
Fully exploiting the capabilities of broadband connections through the use of new-generation applications.
Transferring new network services and applications to all levels of educational use, and eventually the broader Internet community.
The uses of the network span from collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis to social networking. Some of these applications are in varying levels of commercialization, such as IPv6, open-source middleware for secure network access, Layer 2 VPNs and dynamic circuit networks.
