According to analysts, while Internet2 may be providing high-speed connectivity for universities, other organizations and select companies, consumers cannot expect to access it anytime soon.

"This is a model for what the next generation of deployment will look like, but you won't be able to get on it," Gartner research director Rob Batchelder told NewsFactor.

"It's an expensive playground with high bandwidth," Batchelder added. "Is it the next place everybody's going to be? No. It's a lab project, a big lab project."

The Future Is Here

Mike Vildibill, director of the Southern California NGI (Next Generation Internet Application Center) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), told NewsFactor that Internet2, which shares some of the infrastructure and characteristics of the World Wide Web, has been realized in many ways and is no longer the super-network of tomorrow.

"Internet2 was the network of the future three years ago, and now the future is here," Vildibill said. "It's become the high-production, high-bandwidth network of today."

However, Vildibill said, the addition of numerous institutions and businesses to Internet2 has decreased the powerful network's flexibility and has made it less useful to researchers looking for "bleeding edge" computing power and technology.

Making High Speed Faster

Vildibill, who refers to Internet2 as "a real-world testbed," said researchers, academics and some businesses now are looking for a new next-generation Internet, focusing on such projects as the National Science Foundation's Teragrid effort.

Vildibill said that while Internet2 delivers bandwidth of OC-12 (622 megabits per second) -- about 300 times faster than a cable modem -- federal research labs are working on a high-bandwidth backbone that would deliver as much as 64 times the speed of Internet2.

Light Waves and Lambdas

Referring to fiber-optic networks and lambdas -- optical networking switches -- Vildibill said more and more data is being compressed into light waves, which he called the fundamental unit of networking in the future.

"The basic commodity will be light waves, and you'll get the whole thing or nothing," he said. "Applications, not network administrators, will determine where they want lambdas and when they want them."

Closed Network

But even as researchers and cutting-edge companies move on to the next big thing, Gartner's Batchelder said Internet2 will remain out of reach for most would-be surfers.

"Right now, Internet2 is a parallel universe over a lot of the Internet's core universe, but it's a closed universe," he said. "Internet2 is not a reality until that hyper connection goes to the home.

"I can't imagine [Internet2] being available to consumers within the next five years," Batchelder added.