Status Report ICFA Networking Task Force, July 1998

Networking and the Internet are "mission-critical" for the work of the ICFA community today, and this dependence is likely to increase over the next decade. The very nature of our research is forcing rapid evolution through generations of experiments with even higher data acquisition rates, stored data volumes and computational requirements, as well as towards even larger collaborations with an unprecedented geographic spread. Our methods of personal and group communication are evolving fast, and we increasingly need to deal with the transfer of physics data in a fully automatic way, as part of a completely distributed computing environment.