As Internet technology became an overwhelming commercial success in the early 1990s, a combined effort by academia, industry, and government worked to recreate the innovative environment that fostered its initial development. Representatives from the universities, companies, and research laboratories involved in creating the Internet held workshops and wrote papers to explore how best to ensure the continued development and improvement of underlying networking technologies and their deployment. Most importantly, these discussions considered how to enable a new generation of applications that did not work well or at all using Internet technology available at that time.
In 1996, Internet2 was created when 34 universities established a project to foster the development of networking capabilities that would not only support the leading-edge needs of research and education, but would also eventually make their way into the global commercial Internet. The universities committed to investing resources on their own campuses, and encouraging other organizations able and willing to make similar commitments to actively collaborate in this effort. Many more universities, companies, and other organizations soon joined, and the Internet2 community quickly began to work towards developing and deploying tomorrow's Internet technology.
Today, Internet2 includes more than 200 U.S. universities, over 60 companies, and numerous government agencies, research labs, and other organizations. Advanced networking has become an integral part of many academic disciplines, including health sciences, performing arts, high-energy physics, and astronomy. As part of the Internet2 mission to accelerate the advancement of the Internet, scientists and researchers at member organizations are experimenting with and improving networking protocols, hardware, and software. Working groups and initiatives are actively developing and deploying a wide range of advanced networking capabilities. Technologies previously tested by the Internet2 community have now made their way into today’s commercial Internet.
The advanced networking community today encompasses millions of individuals around the world. Internet2 collaborates and interconnects its backbone network with organizations in more than 50 other countries. Internet2 universities have sponsored the participation of individual organizations and state educational network that provide students, teachers, and researchers at more than 46,000 educational and research institutions in the United States with access to advanced networking capabilities. Yet, a decade since its inception, the Internet2 community continues to be focused on the same core mission: to advance networking technology to serve research and education.