Internet 2: The New Era of Online Technology.

• Author: STRICKER, JULIE

In October, hundreds of technology experts in Seattle watched a group of Inupiat a capella singers perform from the Institute of International Arctic Research on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. The interactive performance was broadcast live--via the Internet--on a high-definition, wall-size screen with crystal clarity. Researchers in Seattle could talk with an Alaskan reindeer herder as easily as if they were in the same room--not thousands of miles apart.

It was just one example of the future of the Internet: a seamless interactive multimedia world in which you may be able to log on to your computer to order a pizza and get a tantalizing whiff of pepperoni; or work out a marketing scheme in a real-time virtual conference room with people in New York, Anchorage, Las Vegas and Seattle; or caress the tender skin of your newborn niece from 3,000 miles away.

This isn't your teenagers' Internet. At least not yet. Researchers are developing new ways to send high-definition television signals over the Internet, as well as how to digitize smell, taste, even touch, according to Greg Wood of the non-profit University Corporation of Advanced Internet Development.

In October, the University of Alaska system joined this high-tech revolution when it signed onto a private, high-speed backbone network called Internet2, linking Alaska with many of the nation's finest universities. It operates at 622 million bits per second, more than 20,000 times faster than a typical modem.

"It's like going from a two-lane highway to a 200-lane highway," says Steve Smith, chief technology officer for University of Alaska information technology services. "What we're really all working on here is what is going to be the next generation of the Internet for the country or the world."

The current Internet got its start three decades ago as the federally funded Advanced Research Projects Agency, which created a network, ARPAnet, to test whether computers could exchange information over a network. It linked four universities at 50 kilobits per second. Researchers developed e-mail in 1972 and the World Wide Web in 1990. Now millions of people, institutions and companies are online.

New technologies require a clear, large-bandwidth network-something that is not possible with the current Internet, which is as congested as a shopping mall parking lot at Christmas time.

In 1996, 34 universities received National Science Foundation funding for a new high-speed Internet...