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Web Creators Call Internet Outdated
ElvaWSJ writes "Several networking pioneers are dissatisfied with the Internet's underpinnings, and some are offering remedies to ease the strain that bandwidth-hungry services put on technology networks. Along with other projects here in the US and around the world, numerous companies and organizations are looking to rewrite the underpinnings of the internet. This piece looks at new concerns from old hands at networking, with comments from folks like Larry Roberts and Len Bosack. 'Mr. Roberts's concern over the Internet's infrastructure stretches back years. Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.'"
The solution according to Roberts:
...
"Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission."
No thanks.
The solution according to Bosack:
"Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes."
That would be really nice, how about making use of all the dark fiber first.
All in all, we see the people who were involved in the creation of the Internet now got into the private business and use all possible means of pushing said business forward. It's almost sad they did so good job the first time, that now they have created solutions in search of a problem
Seriously, there really isn't anything that wrong with the Internet.
My junk mail folder seems to disagree with you.
Well, chalk it up to a bit of 'tin foil hat-ism' on my part, but, I can definitely see MANY governments wanting a hand in a redesign of the 'internet'.
Accurate identification of all using it (no more anon. access/abilities). Heavy filtering of content (gotta protect the IP of our corporate 'sponsors').....and that silly way the current internet lets most anyone connect their own computer, and be a PEER amongst all the other computers...nothing really special needed to hook up any type server you want to run, and have it be just as accesible as a room of servers from MegaCorp, Inc.
Sure the current system isn't perfect, but, in many cases those imperfections many seek to fix aren't physical...they are the ones that are more theoretical. This current internet lets Joe Q. Citizen do a little too much, speak a little to loudly....while I mourn at the loss of the "wild west" days of the internet already to a great degree, I'd hate to see it disappear entirely.
I personally am a little afraid of what some would like to fix about the current tubes we're running on.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You're supposed to occasionally delete messages from your junk mail folder, for the exact reason of preventing it from becoming sentient. Nice work destroying us all.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trebuchet loaded with a metric ton of backup tapes.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of the internet after all it has been through? It's running out of bandwidth. Packets aren't guaranteed to be delivered. People are using it for fucking video and telephone. Mr. Roberts turned out to be an engineer, and now he's selling flow routers. All you people care about is carving out bandwidth. It's a series of tubes! What you don't realize is that the Internet is just being the Internet and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it. The Internet hasn't updated its hardware in years. It prefixes everything with "www" because all you people care about is WINNING! WINNING! WINNING! LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even loads you bastards! LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! Please! Len Bosack talked about adequacy and said if the Internet was adequate it would connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times its capacity. Speaking of adequacy, when is it adequate to publicly bash an international communications network who is going through a hard time?
Gee, if only we had some method to control the transportation of packets. I envision it starting with something like a handshake between two hosts so each would know that the other was ready. Then you'd want to assign sequence numbers to each packet so the recipient would know if a packet had been dropped. The recipient might have some way to acknowledge each packet, so the sender knows that the recipient received it. And there might even be some way for either endpoint to tell the other that it's finished with the conversation, allowing timely cleanup of network resources.
Nah, I'm dreaming. If such a magic "transport control" protocol were possible, surely the inventors of the Internet would have figured it out by now.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Having been around at the beginning, I should comment on this.
There are some fundamental problems with the way the Internet works, but hardware has saved us from having to solve them. The biggest problem is that we still can't deal effectively with congestion in the middle of a pure datagram network. We know what to do out near the edges (look up "fair queuing", which I invented), but in the middle, where there are too many flows and too little transit delay, that doesn't work.
The practical solution to the problem has been cheap long-haul bandwidth in the backbone of the network, with routers to match. Early users of the modern Internet may remember the days when MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST would choke on traffic and the whole backbone would start losing half the packets. That was solved by cheap fibre optic links. Today, we have a network where the "last mile" usually saturates before the backbone does. This is what makes the whole thing work. But we never did get a good technical solution to that problem. We have some good hacks: the congestion window in TCP and "Random Early Drop", which together sort of work. At least where most of the traffic is TCP. We still don't have equally effective ways of throttling UDP traffic.
Roberts is a virtual circuit guy. He founded Telenet, which was a virtual circuit system. (I was recruited by Telenet when they had 13 employees, but turned them down.) Telenet was a flop commercially; it didn't scale up well. Telcos love virtual circuits, because they create connections they can bill. And they keep trying to get virtual circuits into the network. X.25, ISDN, ATM, and PPPoE are virtual circuit systems, and they all came from telcos. Roberts is still pushing variations on his virtual circuit scheme.
There are continuing attempts to get some kind of billable virtual circuit thing into the network, and those attempts consistently come from telcos. There was a scheme tried for using multiple PPPoE connections over ADSL links to provide multiple classes of service, with the good ones being more expensive. That didn't fly. The whole "net neutrality" thing is about this. What telcos really want is to be able to charge based on the "value to the consumer". The wireless phone people do this, and cash in big - SMS messages cost more to send than photos. The wireline telcos see themselves being cut out of the revenue stream as video moves to the Internet. They want to create a place where they can step on the hose and cut off the flow unless you pay them extra.
I wrote the classic RFC on this too many years ago. Read the section "Game Theoretic Aspects of Network Congestion". It's still valid. But, as I said above, we don't have to solve the theoretical problem as long as throwing cheap backbone bandwidth at it works. Cheap backbone bandwidth will continue to be available unless some monopoly situation develops that prevents backbone bandwidth from being provided near cost.