Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Blogging from Philadelphia

I am at the Internet2 Fall Meeting here in Philadephia -- three and one half days of discussions, workshops, and demonstrations. We also have some pretty good connectivity here, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.

One demo I am looking forward to seeing is how the high-speed backbone can be used in musical instruction. The video conferencing I have seen, and it is awesome.

A lot of my time will be spend in middleware issues to provide a framework for people to use the resources more effectively and securely.

One thing that many people may not be aware of is that if you are on a university network that has a connection to the high-speed backbone, and are sending materials to another institution that is also connected, chances are it will be routed over the high-speed backbone, thus avoiding the commodity internet. It is difficult to really see a difference, since most people have only 10/100 mbs to the wall port, but it does make a difference when traffic on the commodity internet is running high (as it does every day).

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