Karlin Lillington
Computer-generated worlds where people can interact in real-time over the Internet came closer to reality recently. This was the effect of MCI WorldCom’s quadrupling the capacity of its Very High Performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) in California.
“In essence this is a distributed Holodeck,” says MCI’s lead engineer for vBNS, Rick Wilder, referring to the holographic environment used for entertainment by crew members in the show Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The San Francisco to Los Angeles leg of vBNS, which strings together California’s leading universities and five supercomputing centres, is part of the United States government’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) project. NGI is a research-only set-up intended to create the infrastructure and applications for the Internet of the future. The vBNS already links most major US cities.
The vBNS is now the fastest Internet link in the world, capable of moving data at 2,5 gigabits per second (a gigabit is 1 000 megabits). Most corporate networks transfer data at 10 to 1000 megabits per second. A standard home computer modem creeps along at 56 kilobits per second.
The upgrade required no additional laying of fibre-optic cable. Engineers are using a new technique: sending different colours of light through the cable. Each colour handles different types of data.
According to Vinton Cerf, MCI WorldCom’s senior vice-president of Internet architecture and technology, “vBNS is really a testbed for extremely high bandwidth facilities.”
What makes the new service unique, he says, is that it can offer “sustained bandwidth” of 622 megabits per second for a specific application due to advances in routing traffic over the network.
This is important for ultra-high bandwidth applications required for creating 3D worlds. Any fluctuation in the sending speed will disrupt the real-time continuity of the environment, with potentially disastrous consequences.
For example, researchers believe virtual environments could enable a surgeon in California to perform an operation in Thailand. But the slightest lag in the arrival of data could threaten the patient’s life.