Universities Take Fast Lane On SuperhighwayUniversities Take Fast Lane On Superhighway

Several universities have flipped the switch on high-speed networks to speed online collaboration.

In separate projects, Indiana University in Bloomington, Purdue University in West Lafayette, and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis launched I-Light, the state's $5.3 million fiber-optic network. The University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and Argonne National Laboratory also turned on an international network dubbed StarLight.

Both networks will act as on-ramps to Internet2, a consortium that's building a broadband network walled off from the commercial Internet. The high-speed networks will let researchers at the universities confer in real time and at much faster speeds than on the commercial Internet. It's like a 10,000-lane highway vs. a two-lane country road.