Radical Redesign of the Internet Coming?
Oct 1st, 2007 by msdanielle
Here’s an interesting article I came across this morning at NetworkWorld. Researchers are looking into a possible “radical redesign” of the internet’s underlying routing architecture. The gist of the article is this:
Under debate by the IRTF is how the Internet’s backbone routers operate… Slowing routing table growth would provide other benefits to enterprise network operators… It would make it easier to split network traffic over multiple carriers in a process called multihoming… If the Routing Research Group is unsuccessful, the Internet’s backbone routers won’t crash, experts say. But they will become increasingly expensive to run.
Looks like network engineers have their plates full with this one. How they might successfully redesign the internet is far beyond my comprehension, but the article is a great read for anyone who doesn’t know much about the internet’s architecture.
With today’s exponential growth in social networking sites, user-generated content sites, and blogging, it seems there are immediate pressing concerns regarding this redesign. What is the value of this to you as a contributor, since running these backbone routers could increase in cost? What is the value of this to you as a casual surfer? Who should end up paying for the potential increased costs? In short, what’s the value of the internet to you?
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That’s really interesting, I don’t think we think enough about the underlying workings of the internet. We take for granted the ease and availablity of the internet. But interestingly enough, I’ve traveled to countries that don’t have easy access to internet (especially anything high-speed). The days I had to live with no connection and internet access were very difficult! I felt disconnected from everything and realized the extent of my dependency (not to mention my job’s mere existence relies on the interent)!
hi ayat, we most definitely take the internet for granted. i never even thought about the internet needing an overhaul. still trying to wrap my brain around it… i pay about $28/mo for high speed DSL, and i suppose since my job also depends on the internet (and not to mention my numerous blogs!) i could spare to pay a little more.
That’s… RAD DUDE!!!
like, totally….
Another redesign? I thought that IPv6 was going to be the last big change to the internet for a while.
I’d be curious to know more about the planned inner workings of this Internet 3.0, as it cannot realistically require that every public facing network device be updated or replaced with something new.
That said, I think that any re-design will need to heavily focus on the incredible amounts of bandwidth that we all have available. A few years back I was working with a group of people on a project that would have allowed site-visitors to host and share a small portion of a site from their own PC or home network (think BitTorrent, only far more complicated). This had the potential to reduce the heavy strain on popular sites, since members would be sharing their bandwidth with the host sites in order to give everyone a better user experience. Load balancing on a global scale, with a focus on reducing the number of hops between data points.
It was an exciting project, but unforunately never went anywhere. The lead project coordinator became a father, which was a bit more important than heading an experimental project, and other developers started arguing amongst themselves about the best ways to solve technical problems. In the end, we pulled the plug.
If this is the route some engineers will follow, it will be interesting to see what they might come up with to solve some of the hurdles in place
i never knew there was a first re-design! did you read the article?
speaking of your project, do you feel it would’ve been successful if it had moved forward? i’m trying to follow, but i’m not sure how bandwidth sharing works. how would we ease the overload remotely? what happens? hmm.. wanna write a follow-up thought piece for me on this?
Actually, I haven’t thought about that. Jumping from 256 ADSL to 1024 left me with impression that everything is going “the right way”.
I’m used of having access to Internet 24/7 and without it I would be lost. I felt that one time when power was out. Not good.
i go nuts when my wireless connection is on the fritz… i’m not worried about the internet disappearing, but now that you mention it, it’s a pretty weird thought!
I guess the bottom line is if it has to be done a time has to be picked to do it.
Maybe this kind of thing will happen every 10 years or so! Maybe by shear luck they will make an unbelievable system that is easily adaptable to the changing use for the net!