Vint Cerf Says No To IPv7, Yes To InterPlanetary Web

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 18, 2011 @08:57AM from the free-watson-from-the-bonds-of-earth dept.

jbrodkin writes "IPv6 is here, but what's up with IPv7? Nothing, says Vint Cerf. While one day there may be another new Internet Protocol, work is not happening on it now. 'At the moment there doesn't seem to be any incentive for inventing yet another one,' he said in an interview. However, he contends that 2011 will be a Big Year for his pet project, the extraterrestrial 'InterPlanetary Internet.' The 'Bundle' network protocols will be tested in space and standardized to 'make them available to all the space-faring countries.' As they are used with more spacecraft, 'we can literally grow an interplanetary network that can support both man and robotic exploration.'"

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Back to Usenet? by CRCulver · 2011-02-18 09:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

In his novel A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge's vision of a galactic internet was basically Usenet newsgroups writ large. Once the web took off, he got a lot of flak for that seemingly outdated vision, but perhaps he's right. As easy as real-time communication is nowadays to people around the globe, once the internet moves into space, the incredible latency of long-distance communications could return us to a series of groups and threads that one logs into periodically, downloads en masse, and reads locally.