Imagine a surgeon guiding a scalpel by remote control over today's Internet -- with its glitches, brownouts, packet losses, and everything else that can go wrong.
If that sounds a bit dicey, a new fiber-optic network is working toward the day when the Net will be able to handle telemedicine and other highly sensitive procedures both safely and reliably.
"It's the ground floor of a totally networked environment," said Ben Scott, CEO of IXC Communications, talking about the company's Gemini 2000 network, which opened for business Monday.
Various government and university projects have tried to build a nationwide network devoted to pure research, the way the old Internet originally was before commercial interests took over.
Scientists and large corporations want to develop high-end networks offering error-free, real-time data flow, without the lags and logjams that clog the public Internet. So far, researchers can only find that kind of purity in a closed, proprietary network.
But Gemini 2000 may change that, promising high-end customers a better level of service.
"The major networks are still voice oriented," said Scott. "They run data on low[er]-speed separate circuits. Others plan to use ATM data switches on networks that are designed to run voice."
Scott said Gemini 2000 is based on pure Internet protocols over broadband fiber and allows Internet service providers to carry high-end commercial and research-community traffic.
IXC said its new network runs on a high-speed "OC-48" fiber network, with data throughput that is 100 to 1,000 times faster than today's Internet. That eliminates the backups and overloads we all know and love.
The network runs on standard open Internet protocols, employing fiber and network hardware technology from Cisco Systems, Newbridge, and Nortel Networks. It is divided into eight regions nationwide, each containing a central traffic aggregation point.
The result is a platform suitable for a range of businesses, healthcare, and multimedia applications, IXC said.
"It's the best hope to pursue solutions to global health, education, and environmental problems," Scott said.
Richard Mandelbaum, chairman and CEO of AppliedTheory Communications, a network service provider, said his company will use Gemini to deliver on the unfulfilled promise of the Internet.
"For the commercial sector," he said, "this means we will be diverting [company data] to have virtual private networks that truly transform the wide-area network into an extension of the local-area network."
