Research Universities Hope Trump’s Infrastructure Plans Could Be a Boon to High-Speed Communications

PARI

When Donald Trump promises to rebuild U.S. infrastructure, he mostly means highways, bridges, and airports. Might he also mean better high-speed internet for research universities?

The incoming administration hasn’t yet made its plans clear, but there’s at least some hope in the research community. And a leading candidate for assistance could be Internet2, a dedicated high-speed, high-volume link serving scientists at more than 300 universities.

For now, the 20-year-old consortium has plenty of domestic capacity, said H. Dave Lambert, president of Internet2. “We have enormous amounts of bandwidth,” Mr. Lambert said in an interview.

But technology and usage rates can change rapidly, Mr. Lambert said, and a chief concern is the need to build far better connections between American institutions and international partners.

Internet2’s existing capabilities are appreciated by researchers such as Morris B. Cohen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose work involves large antennas that collect radio-wave emissions. With data from his antennas, Mr. Cohen is exploring ways of predicting earthquakes and tornadoes by studying the wave signals that precede such events.

His work was boosted by the last major infusion of federal cash for Internet2 and related broadband infrastructure, which came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package. One local benefit of that act was a high-speed link from the Internet2 network to the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in western North Carolina.

Pisgah’s antenna field is a former NASA tracking station and Pentagon listening post converted by a local philanthropist into an educational facility. It’s a three-hour drive from Georgia Tech, and the new high-speed connection along the Internet2 network lets Mr. Cohen remotely pull in huge volumes of radio-emissions data any time a tornado or other major storm system is reported anywhere near the facility, which happens about once a month. That helps him study correlations that might improve predictions of dangerous weather.

Retrieving data from other facilities without such connections, Mr. Cohen said, is far more time-consuming and increases the likelihood of missing important events. It typically involves contacting someone on site, asking them to “walk over to a computer and move some files for us, and then send us a hard drive” — a slow process that doesn’t always go smoothly, he said.

Grants vs. Incentives

Internet2 was founded in 1996 by a group of 34 research universities as a means of giving their scientists a direct and reliable high-speed and high-capacity connection outside the service limits and fluctuations of the regular internet. It now has more than 300 university members, as well as 80-plus corporate partners and dozens of state and regional affiliates that allow some connections to local schools and other users. It works by purchasing the use of dedicated transmission lines owned by major commercial internet-service providers.

The Internet2 consortium has an annual budget of about $80 million, largely funded by its users — mostly researchers who rely on federal grant support. The network got a major upgrade in 2010 thanks to about $60 million from the stimulus package, combined with $20 million from the corporate sector and another $20 million from its own reserves. The service line extended out to locations such as Pisgah was also helped by the stimulus bill, part of a $1-billion infusion for state and local education networks working with local and corporate partners.

Whether Mr. Trump would advocate something similar is unclear. While Hillary Clinton made broadband internet an unambiguous part of her definition of infrastructure projects she’d like to support, Mr. Trump put greater emphasis on more traditional brick-and-mortar improvements.

Internet seems unlikely to be included in a Trump plan, conservative analysts said, in part because Mr. Trump appears more interested in offering tax and financing incentives for private construction rather than making outright grants of federal money.

It might be possible to construct some kind of toll-based funding system for an Internet2 expansion, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a right-leaning policy institute, and a chief economist in the George W. Bush administration. But, he said, “I’d be surprised if they were to go that route.”

Any federal money for a project that its owners can’t afford upfront is a bad idea, said Randal O’Toole, a transportation analyst at the Cato Institute.

Future Needs

The leading association of research universities, however, is more optimistic. University leaders expect to talk with Trump officials “about the potential that scientific infrastructure would be a piece of a major infrastructure proposal,” with Internet2 a key component, said Tobin L. Smith, vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities.

Mr. Lambert isn’t sure what outcome is more likely during the Trump administration. He said that Internet2 already has a user-fee structure to support itself, and that it’s working well. “Internet2 right now is very much in a thriving mode,” he said.

But nonprofit universities have limited capacity to finance major new expansions, Mr. Lambert said, and that’s where another jolt of federal support could be helpful. The biggest immediate unmet need, he said, concerns international expansion. Foreign partners appear willing, and Internet2 could use some help from the federal government to work with them, Mr. Lambert said.

[[relatedcontent align="right” size="half-width”]] “If we can find sources of investment, including government investment, we’re very good and very creative about turning that into sustainable infrastructure,” he said. In a written follow-up response, Mr. Lambert said he couldn’t even rule out his board agreeing to restructure the organization to allow outsiders majority control if that was the model being offered by the Trump administration. “I’m not sure how the board would react if the end result was ubiquitous and robust broadband for all of higher ed,” he said.

International expansion is a goal shared by American researchers such as Mr. Cohen. For obtaining data from more remote locations such as Alaska and Japan, his lab relies on satellite internet connections, which can be very slow and unreliable, leading to missed scientific opportunities.

In the case of Japan, Mr. Cohen is trying to find out whether changes in radio-wave patterns might help predict earthquakes. That involves waiting for a quake to strike, and then going back and saving the radio-wave data that arrived beforehand.

“We have definitely missed a couple of those because we couldn’t connect solidly to our Japan receiver,” he said. Similarly, Mr. Cohen says he also tries to help monitor North Korean nuclear tests and has lost opportunities there, too, because of poor internet connectivity.

Internet2 also has political support closer to home. Although they consume only a fraction of its bandwidth, public elementary and secondary schools are increasingly gaining connections to Internet2’s pipeline for purposes that include giving students access to university libraries. And university educators developing and sharing online course content are also making use of Internet2, Mr. Lambert said.

Right now, the demand appears manageable, said S. Mark Johnson, chief technology strategist at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, a state-level provider of Internet2 connections to universities as well as community colleges, local schools, and libraries. “There’s quite a lot of untapped capacity on the fiber,” Mr. Johnson said.

But with so many research fields finding new data-rich opportunities, demand could grow quickly, he said. “It’s a little scary if you project it into the future,” Mr. Johnson said.

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.