It is a non-profit making group comprising

• US’s leading technology houses like; AT&T, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems

• 200 academic institutes

• Government organisations like; NSF, NASA, DARPA, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Arts.

These organisations have come together to develop and deploy advanced networking technologies to create tomorrow’s Internet. Internet2 is neither a separate physical network nor will it replace the existing Internet.

The motive is to bring together resources from the academies, industries and government sectors to develop new technologies at an increased speed over Internet.

Internet2 will involve high performance applications, which will not work on today’s Internet. These applications will not run across commercial Internet connections.

Internet2 is about everything in higher education. It will have digital libraries, virtual laboratories and tele-immersion facilities. Universities are actively participating in the development of Internet2 because they continually need collaboration of personnel and hardware located at places throughout the country in ways not possible through today’s Internet.

The four main attr-ibutes of these applications are:

1. Interaction with others without the barriers of distance

2. Access to remote resources, such as telescopes and microscopes

3. Network-wide computation and data services

4. Displaying information through virtual reality environments — moving to three-dimensional animations.

Present applications will run slower on Internet2 because our PC’s OS is developed to run on congested networks thus are not compatible with the Internet2.