FOUNDATION AWARDS GRANTS FOR NEW HIGH-SPEED INTERNET

The folks who helped develop the Internet and the World WideWeb are establishing a new high-speed Internet with potentiallylarge consequences for science, education and ordinary Internetusers.

The National Science Foundation on Thursday announced grants to13 educational institutions to help them establish links to its newsuper net -- which will operate at many times the speed of thecommercial Internet.

The network is expected to be used soon by dozens ofeducational institutions for cooperative experiments in science andcommunication that could reshape the ordinary Internet that growingnumbers of Americans use.

The new net is likely to facilitate breakthroughs in multimediacommunications and in remote access to very large data collections,NSF officials said. Such technical innovations are expected toquickly find uses in the commercial Internet.

For ordinary people this might mean high-quality sight andsound links with distant friends, access to expert systems that taplarge distant data bases to provide medical or business advice, orvirtual reality game playing.

Those capabilities are widely seen as the next logical steps inInternet development and the technology to permit them is beingeagerly pursued in the commercial Internet industry.

Building the speed of Internet connections at home, school orwork and the capacity of Internet superhighways are seen asimportant challenges to making the new technology more broadlypopular and useful.

The new network, being developed jointly by the sciencefoundation and MCI, Inc., is expected to push the edge of currenttechnology by reaching a speed of 622 megabytes per second (MBs) bythe end of this year. That compares to a top speed of about 45 MBsfor the best current commercial Internet links.

Foundation grants of up to $350,000 each were received by 13 of16 original applicants for help in linking to the new net. Another35 applications will be considered for a second round of awards.