Next Generation Internet

In October 1996, President Clinton proposed the Next Generation Internet (NGI). This project was a plan to build a national network that connects universities and federal research organizations at rates 100 to 1,000 time faster than the existing Internet.

The federal government constructed a high performance distributed laboratory consisting of the 100 NGI sites at universities, federal research institutions, and other research partners at speed more than 100 times that of the existing Internet. This laboratory provided a full system, proof-of-concept testbed for hardware, software, protocols, security, and network management required by the commercial NGI. Second, NGI was to develop ultrahigh-speed switching and transmission technologies and end-to-end network connectivity at more than one gigabit per second.