Web 2.0 (and Beyond): Developing the Next Generation of Connectivity

The Internet is the foundation of 21st-century technology, but the Catch-22 of developing new Internet technologies is that scientists are often constrained by the very environment they are attempting to innovate. A test bed for researching new networking ideas was needed, and that’s why the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) was created by the National Science Foundation in 2007 and has since received $80 million in federal investment. GENI is a network of more than 50 sites in more than 30 countries that allows its 3,700 member researchers to test their ideas in a low-latency, high-bandwidth digital environment unconstrained by the foibles of the regular Internet.

Before cutting-edge networking technology can enter the real world, it needs to be tested on a broad scale, and GENI is where that testing happens. Today’s Internet is constrained mainly by three things. The first is bandwidth. There’s not enough uniform connectivity across the Internet to ensure that content can be delivered at the quality and speed necessary for sophisticated new applications to perform effectively. The second is latency. Even relatively low latencies like 100 milliseconds are far too slow for real-time applications that require high precision. The third is security. Security issues will never be thwarted completely, but today’s Internet can’t be used for certain applications in good conscience -- remote surgery, for instance. But GENI technologies, said Glenn Ricart, CTO of US Ignite, allow people to do things that are usually impossible on today’s Internet.