Telecom Policy & Initiatives

The FCC Rural Healthcare Pilot Program
The FCC Rural Healthcare pilot program is an enhanced funding initiative intended to help public and non-profit health care providers construct state- and region-wide broadband networks to provide telehealth and telemedicine services throughout the nation. The program will fund up to 85% of the costs of constructing those networks, as well as the costs of advanced telecommunications and information services that will ride over these networks. If selected, up to 85% of the cost of connecting to Internet2, a dedicated nationwide backbone, may also be funded by the pilot program. Connection to Internet2 is not required, but may be requested by the applicants. Learn more about this program.

Network Neutrality
Net neutrality refers to the concept of keeping the Internet open to all lawful content, information, applications, and equipment. In the past several months, cable and telephone companies have publicly stated their intent to fundamentally change the architecture of the Internet in order to create tiered networks for premium delivery of their own proprietary services. In doing so, this plan would essentially break the Internet model and allow network operators to discriminate against certain Internet users or applications in order to give an advantage to these services. Learn what Internet2 is doing to help protect net neutrality.

 

Partnerships

 

ESnet

ESnet is the high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy scientists and collaborators worldwide. Over the past few years, ESnet and Internet2 have shared a common technical vision for the evolution of dynamically delivered network capabilities for future scientific research. Formalizing their collaboration, at the end of August 2006 the two networking organizations announced a partnership to develop and deploy the next generation of ESnet, called ESnet4, with the new Internet2 Network backbone. Thus, both the DOE and the Internet2 community are working together toward their mutual need for the development of a scalable, sustainable, high performance network backbone that connects researchers and scholars at Internet2 member institutions with scientists at the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy's ESnet build-out will follow that of the Internet2 Network. Get more information on ESnet4.

 

 

Sponsored Research Opportunities

Internet2 facilitates research partnerships by providing technical support and consultation on member proposals to government funding agencies; coordinating and collaborating on projects involving member participation; assisting in the deployment of key research findings; and writing letters of support which illustrate the advances in network research that member projects are likely to achieve. Internet2 senior staff members also sit on NSF scientific peer-review panels and meet regularly with government funding agencies to anticipate and respond to research funding trends and priorities, and partner with organizations such as EDUCAUSE on the creation of topical task forces. Learn more about how Internet2 supports member research activities.