Internet2 A Portal to Other Network

But there was a twist: The meeting planners were in the Kovens Conference Center at the Biscayne Bay campus of Florida International University in North Miami. The musicians were performing in a theater in Miami Beach.

The performance was seen in real time via the Internet2.

The Internet2 is not our Internet. Built for the use of universities and research institutions, it has a bandwidth 21,000 times greater than that of the Internet we use daily, and it transmits at the speed of light, making sight and sound instantaneous, so there's no lag time.

FIU operates the AMPATH GigaPOP, located at the NAP of the Americas in downtown Miami. It connects the Internet2's Abilene network to a network of regional universities and educational institutions in the United States as well as to their counterparts in Latin America and throughout the Caribbean. AMPATH has a National Science Foundation grant of more than $500,000.

Julio Ibarra, who runs AMPATH for FIU, says the purpose of the demonstration was to show meeting planners the kind of technology available locally. Events that take place at the Kovens Conference Center, built in 1995, can hook up to the Internet2, giving outsiders a chance to use the network, which would normally be off limits.