Internet2 + Internet2 Network (formerly Abilene)

This is a work-in-progress & will be updated soon! :-D

Internet2 Network (formerly Abilene) - Source internet2.edu

Quotes taken from internet2.edu

Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies.

By bringing research and academia together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community, Internet2 promotes collaboration and innovation that has a fundamental impact on the future of the Internet.

• Internet2 is a not-for-profit advanced networking consortium comprising more than 200 U.S. universities in cooperation with 70 leading corporations, 45 government agencies, laboratories and other institutions of higher learning as well as over 50 international partner organizations.
• Internet2 members leverage its high-performance network (i.e. I2 Network) and worldwide partnerships to support and enhance their educational and research missions.
• Beyond just providing network capacity, Internet2 actively engages our community in the development of important new technology including middleware, security, network research and performance measurement capabilities which are critical to the progress of the Internet.

Quotes taken from Wikipedia

Internet2 is a non-profit consortium that develops and deploys advanced high-performance network applications and technologies for education, research, and the next-generation public Internet. It is led by over 200 universities and partners with many affiliate members and corporate members drawn from companies in the publishing, networking and other technology industries.

The original Internet2 project was founded informally in 1996 under the auspices of EDUCAUSE and was organized as the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) in 1997. UCAID later changed its name to Internet2. Internet2 is a registered trademark. The Internet2 consortium administrative headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Internet2 provides the U.S. research and education community with a network that satisfies their bandwidth-intensive requirements. The network itself is a dynamic, robust and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network. It furnishes a 100Gb/s network backbone to more than 210 U.S. educational institutions, 70 corporations and 45 non-profit and government agencies.

The uses of the network span from collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis and social networking. Some of these applications are in varying levels of commercialization, such as IPv6, open-source middleware for secure network access, layer 2 VPNs and dynamic circuit networks.

Internet2, with help from its members, created the Abilene Network and was a prime investor in the National LambdaRail (NLR) project, with nearly 10 million dollars. During 2004–2006, Internet2 and NLR held extensive discussions regarding a possible merger. Key to this merger was the condition that Internet2 would operate its successor to Abilene using NLR's infrastructure (NLR has IRUs on actual fiber infrastructure from WilTel, now Level(3), where Internet2 utilizes leased optical wavelengths from Qwest for Abilene). Those talks paused in the Spring of 2006, resumed in March 2007 and eventually fell apart in September 2007.