Is it time to scrap the Internet and start over?
With millions of people watching shows and movies online, service providers may become so overwhelmed that the Internet may seem outmoded.
from the October 25, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
The core "backbone" of the Internet is not the issue, most agree. But there's a huge discrepancy between how fast information gets to your city and how fast it enters your home.
Online speeds are only as fast as the slowest link. And many Internet service providers balk at the massive price tag attached to laying fiber-optic cables to every neighborhood doorstep.
Verizon FiOS, which trumpets itself as the only US "fiber-optics network straight to your home," hopes to reach 9 million houses by the end of the year. In all, the network will likely cost $18 billion. The telephone company aims to make up the investment over the long term by luring new customers with its faster speeds.
Still, capacity at a local level "has been a challenge, especially in the US," says Vinton Cerf, who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005 for his contribution in developing the Internet. In an e-mail, Mr. Cerf said he expects that as technology improves, Americans "can look forward to gigabit-per-second access speeds – and these already exist in countries like Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere."
In particular, Japan enjoys broadband speeds that are 12.7 times faster and 12.3 times cheaper than the average connection in the US, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a public-policy think tank in Washington. Analysts attribute Japan's advantage to two factors: population density – the country doesn't have to worry about wiring wide-open states such as Montana or Nebraska – and a larger willingness to swallow costs in the name of innovation.
In August, Japan's Communications Minister Yoshihide Suga announced a plan to imagine and develop a brand-new Internet – one that might replace the current Web. The American National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a similar "clean slate" endeavor in 2005.
"We're thinking, 15 years from now, what do we want the Internet to look like?" says David Clark, the effort's chief evangelist and a key architect of the Internet in the 1970s and '80s. The NSF is approaching its third wave of grants for researchers to develop and discuss long-term solutions to handling digital information.
"I'm not talking about speed or bandwidth," he says. "The private sector can handle that. We're looking for ways to make the Internet fundamentally safer and more manageable. That might require making an Internet from scratch. It might mean we'll have two parallel Internets. We don't know yet."
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