The current Net has little to impede you as you search for information. If you want to find the exact height of the Eiffel Tower, for example, and also see a small video or a photo of it, you can, within seconds.

But if you want to have a live conversation with someone standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, at night, as if they were on the other side of a clear window -- with the tower shimmering in more realistic detail than you can absorb -- you have two choices. You can either fly there right now, or you can use a PC hooked into the next-generation Internet.

That's right: An Internet that leaves the current Internet in the dust is within reach. Some lucky individuals have already seen the possibilities thanks to the next-gen Net's major research network , a consortium of more than 300 universities, research labs, government agencies, and corporations called Internet2.

The Other Side

In 2005, at a conference in San Diego, a team from the University of Washington showed two high-definition screens. On one screen were small head shots of seven people, stacked in a "Hollywood Squares"-style grid. On the other was a single head shot of a different person, who was talking. All of the people were in different physical locations, meeting together live via uncompressed high-definition video transmitted over Internet2.

"It was a lot different from what we have been calling a 'videoconference,'" says Michael Wellings, engineering director for streaming media and broadcast at UW.

"Some of the people held up sheets of paper to the camera, for the others to see on their screen, and the writing on the papers could be read," he remembers. "It was literally like seeing someone else on the other side of a glass window."

The demonstration in San Diego was one answer to the big question of next-gen Net: What would people do if transmission speeds were practically unlimited on the Internet, if delays were not an issue?

As it turns out, most of the answers involve eliminating the distance between people.

To make video transmission and personal interaction so immediate that the remoteness of the participants is erased, you need lots and lots of bandwidth. Bandwidth is the speed at which information -- text, pictures, video, and other data -- is carried over the Internet. You can visualize the now-vanishing dial-up Internet, with modem speeds of up to 56 Kbps, as a leisurely country lane. Broadband Internet, such as DSL or cable (1 to 5 Mbps), might be a regular street that you travel to get to work. (continued...)

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