Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

May 8, 2007

About three years ago, David Clark of the Minnesota Institute of Technology sounded an alarm about the Internet's problems at that time. His major concern was Internet security, an issue that's now become very clear to everyone.

Clark felt the Internet had an intrinsic security problem that should be solved in a way that's more fundamental than just gluing a bit of security on the edges.

However, if security costs continue to rise and bandwidth costs continue to fall at their current rates, we'll reach a point in 2010 or 2012 where we will spend more on security than on the Internet itself.

Clark also told a funny story about a fellow professor who once said that the Internet had left out the most important protocol. "What was that?" Clark asked, eager to work on fixing the problem. The professor replied, "The one that routes the money."

This simply points out the second problem: the Internet may well be the only example of "bill and keep" in any retail system in the world. But what would happen if airlines worldwide flew passengers according to a model where the first airline that passengers board sells them a ticket for the first part of the trip and keeps all the money. And then passengers are able to make connections to other airlines and fly anywhere? You can bet that on those connecting airlines you'd get minimal service at best, and not too many would stay in business.

Today, settlement is a part of every wholesale or retail supply chain and every telecom service, except the Internet.

Even as far back as the mid-1990s, ISPs themselves were saying that without settlement there'd never be Internet QoS (Quality of Service) because the full chain of providers involved in Internet flows couldn't be paid for playing their part, and receiving adequate compensation.

Overall, Clark isn't the only one who's saying that something new is needed. The topic even is reaching the mainstream print media. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article on April 25 titled "The clean slate way to redo the Internet."

It quoted Rutgers University professor Dipankar Raychaudhuri as saying that the Internet "was designed for completely different assumptions" and that "it's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

The Inquirer article raises broader concerns, all rooted in the fact that the Internet's design reflects the constraints of the early 70s. Computing in that period was based on monolithic mainframes and dumb terminals. Technology and application requirements have since moved way beyond that modest beginning.

Has time stood still in the network world? If it hasn't, the Internet's mission also must have changed, along with the technology on which it is based: the IP Protocol. Also, there's a lot more to this than just media hype and speeches. The National Science Foundation in the United States, as well as a number of projects in the European Union are examining new architectures for the Internet.

The IP Sphere Forum has taken up the issue of how to support all the possible models of billing and settlement over IP networks and networks built of hybrid IT, Ethernet and optical technologies. How fast these processes will move forward is anyone's guess. However, it's very clear that there is growing momentum to examine many of the Internet's basic properties and designs.

As the Inquirer article points out, it won't be as easy to redesign the Internet as it was to first design it from the ground up. There was no commercial use back in the 1970s, no users to scream about changes in their services and no vendors with turf to protect.

Today, there are many legitimate questions, and many of them that represent specific legal concerns, about whether it would be best to do the clean-slate changes some propose or take a more adaptive approach, as the IP Sphere Forum suggests.

It's clear that the Internet of the future probably will have to support the current browsers and other consumer devices and tools, so the changes are likely to come deeper in the core, where they don't have an immediate impact on users. Some signs of those changes may be emerging already. British Telecom, whose 21-CN is the most ambitious convergence project ever undertaken, has recently told its suppliers that they will have to support PBT (Provider Backbone Transport), an Ethernet-based trunking architecture, in addition to IP.

There are now many observers that believe PBT is a threat to IP/MPLS, which has been the linchpin of router-vendor convergence strategies. The most significant thing about PBT, however, may be that it could be the first widely deployed non-IP technology to carry IP traffic.

The Internet is one of the most important technical innovations of modern times, and changes in how it works will have far-reaching consequences. We're probably at the very beginning of a period of great changes. Eventually, those changes probably will make things better, but there surely will be stumbles and roadblocks for vendors AND users to overcome.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: IT World Canada