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No
one owns it. and no one in particular actually runs it. Yet more
than half a billion people rely on it as they do a light switch.
The internet is a network whose many incarnations-as obscure academic
playpen, info superhighway, vast marketplace, sci-fi-inspired matrix-have
seen it through more than 30 years of ceaseless evolution.
In the mid-1990's, a handful of doomsayers
predicted that the internet would melt down under the strain of
increased volume. They proved to be false prophets, yet now, as
it enters its 33rd year, the net faces other challenges.
The demands and dangers-sudden, news-driven
traffic, security holes, and a clamour for high-speed access to
homes-are concerns that bear no resemblance to those that preoccupied
the internet's creators. For all their genius, they failed to see
what the net would become once it left the confines of the university
and entered the free market.
Those perils are inextricably linked to what
experts consider the internet's big promise: evolving into a utility
as ubiquitous as electricity. That, too, was not foreseen by most
of the engineers and computer scientists who built the net in the
1960's and 70's.
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"We're done with just voice
and text, we want to see stuff move, and we want it to be better
then television" |
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Ten years ago, the same year that the World
Wide Web was put in place, the net was home to some 727,000 hosts,
or computers with unique Internet Protocol, or ip, addresses. By
the end of 2001, that number had soared to 175 million, according
to estimates by Matrix Net Systems, a network measurement business
in Austin, Tex.
For all that growth, the net operates with
surprisingly few hiccups, 24 hours a day-and with few visible signs
of who is responsible for keeping it that way. There are no vans
with Internet Inc. logos, no workers in Cyberspace hard hats hovering
over manholes.
Such is yet another of the internet's glorious
mysteries. No one really owns the net, which, as most people know
by now, is actually a sprawling collection of networks owned by
various telecommunications carriers. What, then, is the future of
this vital public utility? Who determines it? And who is charged
with carrying it out?
| Wired Wisdom |
 Thou
Shalt Celebrate
THE PROGNOSIS FOR INDIAN TELECOM
A year ago China drew investors looking to cash in on the craze
for basic cellular voice service. But now the pundits say more
exciting growth potential might be found in Indonesia, the Philippines,
and yes, India. With more than five million mobile customers,
India is set to see its telecom market grow at 24 per cent annually
over the next three years according to one forecast. China's
two wireless companies enjoy fat margins that can only narrow,
say observers. Per-user revenues in China have fallen faster
than anticipated.
Thou Shalt Mourn
THE DEMISE OF BANDWIDTH TRADING
One of the next big things has collapsed amid a glut of fibreoptic
cable and the bankruptcy of Enron Corp., its biggest proponent.
Bandwidth was once thought to be a commodity as easily traded
as gold or oil. The bursting of the internet bubble, however,
revealed bandwidth trading, like many of the worst excesses
of the dotcom boom, to be little more than hype. Several small
bandwidth exchanges that cropped up during the technology
boom have today all but disappeared.
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For the internet's first 25 years, the US government
ran parts of it, financed network research, and in some cases paid
companies to build custom equipment to run the network. But in the
mid-1990's the net became a commercial enterprise, its operation
was transferred to private carriers. Most of the government's control
evaporated.
Now the network depends on the cooperation
and mutual interests of the telecom companies. Those so-called backbone
providers adhere to what are known as peering arrangements, essentially
agreements to exchange traffic at no charge. And for now, capacity
is not a particularly pressing problem because the backbone providers
have been laying high-speed lines at prodigious rates. A lot isn't
used, but it's available. Still, the fear that the net is not up
to its unforeseen role still gnaws at prognosticators. Consider
the gigalapse prediction.
In December 1995, Robert Metcalfe, who invented
the office network technology known as Ethernet, predicted what
he called a gigalapse, or one billion lost user hours resulting
from a severed link-for instance, a ruptured connection between
a service provider and the rest of the internet, a backhoe's cutting
a cable by mistake or the failure of a router. The disaster would
come by the end of 1996, he said, or he would eat his words.
The gigalapse did not occur, and at in 1997,
Metcalfe literally ate his column in public. The failure of his
prediction stemmed from the success of the net's basic architecture.
It was designed as a distributed network rather than a centralised
one; data takes any number of different paths to its destination.
That simple principle has, time and again, saved the network from
failure. But on September 11, within minutes of the terror attacks,
the question was not whether the internet could handle the sudden
wave of traffic, but whether the servers-the computers that deliver
content to anyone who clicks on a Web link-were up to the task.
Executives at cnn.com were the first to notice
the internet's true Achilles' heel: the communications link to individual
sites that become deluged with traffic. Most large companies have
active mirror sites to allow quick downloading of the information
on their servers. And as with so many things about the net, responsibility
lies with the service provider.
Only when full high-speed access, or broadband,
is established will the internet and its multimedia arm, the Web,
enter the next phase of their evolution. About 16 per cent of all
US households online, or 10.7 million homes, have such access. Where,
when, and how much access is available is up to the individual provider-typically,
the phone or cable company. As a result, availability varies widely.
Control falls to the marketplace. And in light
of recent bankruptcies and mergers among providers, universal broadband
deployment may be moving further into the future. As the internet
continues to grow and sprawl, security is also a nagging concern.
The internet was not built to be secure in the first place: its
openness is its core strength and its most conspicuous weakness.
There is no centralised or even far-flung security management for
the internet, but a centralised system that could authenticate the
origin of all traffic would be useful in tracing the source of an
attack. But a delicate balance must be struck between the ability
to trace traffic and the desire to protect privacy. Past plans for
identity verification have failed because of the complexity of making
them work on a global scale.
Metcalfe predicts that the next big step is
what he calls the video internet. ''We're done with just voice and
text,'' he said. ''No one is quite sure what the killer app will
be, but we want to see stuff move, and we want it to be better than
television.''
Despite his joke about eating his words, Metcalfe
said he was unrepentant about his forecast of a gigalapse. ''There's
a gigalapse in our future,'' he said. ''The net's getting bigger
all the time and there are basic fragilities.'' Since there is no
formal tracking mechanism for failures his gigalapse may well have
happened already without anyone noticing. ''I'm sure there are outages
everyday, but because of the internet's robust nature they are generally
not noticed,'' he said. ''We do control-alt-delete and chant, and
eventually the connection comes back.''
Indeed it does.
New York Times News Service
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