Upgrade revolution is necessary - The Internet

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 2003

The Internet needs a revolution--not a mere progression--in its infrastructure. Scaling it up will not be enough to keep pace with growing demand or to accommodate emerging technologies. Major inroads are necessary in the superhighways that convey information around the world and the backroads that carry it into homes.

"We plan a 'clean slate' design," projects Nick McKeown, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford (Calif.) University, who has been charged by the National Science Foundation with designing a new backbone network and perhaps 100 regional switching nodes to route communications traffic throughout the country. "This might end up as a new network. Or it might serve as a guide for how we evolve the Internet in the future."

Today, copper wire brings broadband Internet access to 10,000,000 American homes, observes research project director Hui Zhang, who leads a collaboration from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. The researchers envision a new fiberoptic network reaching 100,000,000 American households within the next few years. McKeown predicts data could enter or leave homes at 100 megabits per second--that is about 2,000 times faster than dial-up Internet access and about 100 times faster than a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL). Over this next-generation network, file size no longer would limit what can be sent over the Internet--removing a major roadblock to delivery of high-definition video on demand.

Greater capability will have a dramatic effect on daily life, but only if the network is much more reliable, economically sustainable for the long run, easier to use and operate, more secure than the present-day system, and anticipates applications not yet envisioned. "Although we are becoming more end more dependent on the Internet, it is scary to imagine anything really important relying on it," warns McKeown. "The Internet is not high enough quality for us to use it for most of our phone calls; it is less dependable and the quality poorer than the existing phone network."

Today's World Wide Web also is vulnerable to denial of service attacks on servers and viral attacks on individual machines. "This is an inherent problem that stems from the way the Internet was designed in the first place," McKeown explains. "People are anonymous, and it's hard to tell where packets really came from." Simplifying the Internet's structure dramatically would improve streaming for, say, DVD-quality television or teleconferencing. Individuals could personalize their video recordings. Moreover, high-tech leaders say such broadband access could generate up to $500,000,000,000 for the struggling economy.