Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 5

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I've already mentioned mobiles in more generally radio has allowed mobility to become part of the Internet environment which it was not particularly although I will say that one of the first three networks that made up the original Internet implementation did include a mobile radio network it was emulated a tactical military communication system, but the kind of mobility that you see with 802.11 Wi-Fi or Wi-Macs or mobile communications is even more rich than the kind of single radio based network mobility that's confined to that one network.

Fibre and cable and digital subscriber loops are providing increasing bandwidths at the edges of the network and certainly at the core of the network, fiber has gone all the way up to 10 to 40 gigabits per second per light wave in optical fibre, so I don't anticipate running out of basic transmission capacity in the Internet any time soon it is anything that might run out soon, its the Internet address space today we are using the 1978 IP version 4 protocols which were standardized many, many years ago.

I made the decision in 1977 to limit the address space to 4.3 billion unique terminations. Now I hope you'll keep in mind that this was an experiment that the Defence Department was supporting and it seemed to me that even the Defence Department wouldn't need more than 4.3 billion anything to test this technology and make sure it will work satisfactorily, however I thought that when the experiment ended if it were successful that we would engineer a production version of the Internet, well that didn't happen that way the Internet continued to grow eventually it became commercially available somewhere to the point now in 2007 where its actually imperative to move over to IP version 6 and has 128 bits of address space, thats 340 times 10 to the 36th addresses that’s 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses which will probably last until after I'm dead and then it's somebody else's problem to worry about.

So I’m very eager to get IPv6 up and running; our Chinese colleagues have made a commitment to be up and running on a national scale with IP version 6 by 2008 in the time for the Olympics they are well on their way the research network CERNET2 is entirely IP version 6 capable and so in fact if you're looking for incentive our Chinese colleagues are supplying that.

Finally on the broadband side in addition to having broadband access I note that most of the consumer broadband access is asymmetric, the consequence of that is that you get these anomalies like two people may be up on broadband and you can both receive high-quality video but neither of them can send it because of the asymmetry.

If you're in the business world when you buy broadband access to the Internet you get symmetric connection E1 and E3 connections and so on are bidirectional full bore bandwidth that's I think the consumer should get too and today they don’t get that and it's important to deliver that because there are applications that consumers would be able to do or could do even if they don't know they want to that yet. Like building servers and having them operate at home. And if your reaction is why would anyone want a server at home it's kind of the same reaction that I remember from Ken Olsen when he was running Digital Equipment Corp. who in 1977 said there's no reason on earth why anyone would ever want a computer at home. Now he was talking about a computer that was the size of a refrigerator of course today you carry them around in your pocket. Size and cost make a big difference.

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