#51 - The Internets future

This blog is either late or early depending on your point of view. Late for Friday, Early for Monday. Hopefully it won't be boring!

News on Friday was there is a group of Internet gurus who are looking at scrapping the Internet as we know it and moving to a more secure faster better Internet. You know the government will get involved so buyer beware!

The Internet as we know it has it roots in a government network called ARPANET. Begun in 1969 ARPANET allowed the 4 networks of UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and th University of California, Santa Barbara to talk to each other. The key to making these independent networks work together was the concept of packet switching. Invented by Donald Davies, Paul Baran, and Leonard Kleinrock, packet switching is where packets of information are routed between nodes over data links shared with other traffic. This allowed for information from one network to smoothly arrive at another network by finding its network address.

The Internet was never designed for what it is today. It was a government/academic collaboration. Security was very low priority. The goal was to gain network stability through spreading the hardware between many different hosts that had the same goals. That is very far from where we have landed today. Just about everyone on the planet knows about the Internet an about 25% of the population has some kind of access to the Internet (70% in the US). This is way larger then the 4 initial networks back in 1969.

So where does the Internet go from here? The incubator for many of the emerging technologies shaping the future is known as Internet2. Formed in 1996 it's a Petrie dish for networking experiments. The project's goals are to create new applications that can't run over the existing Internet and to develop the infrastructure that supports those applications. I think many of these improvements will come as evolution not revolution. The advent of Broadband Internet this past decade has shown that the venerable Internet can handle higher speeds and the volume caused by movies and videos being hosted on the Internet.

The adding of cell phones and PDAs to the Internet provides more pressure on the existing bandwidth and security. Some changes that I would like to see is true IP addressing. Meaning that you couldn't get on the Internet hidden from everyone. That's what the SPAMMERS do. They hide and run so they are very difficult to catch. Also viruses and malware would have a much tougher go if every packet of information had a real start and stop address. Hope it happens soon!