The Internet is outdated, inventor claims
Can we have a new one?
THE BLOKE bloke behind the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPAnet says that the Internet is completely out of date.
Larry Roberts ran ARPAnet, which was the precurser to the Internet. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Roberts said that the technology behind the web is now 40 years old and needs a rethink.
He said that when he was working at ARPAnet he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination.
Now he is convinced that there will be all sorts of hell to pay now that companies are using the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.
Roberts said that the Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television and he should know he designed it.
He now runs a start-up, Anagran which makes a flow router that analyses Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission.
He has become one of the many start-ups trying to producing gear and software to accelerate Internet traffic or to increase the network's capacity.
More here. µ
Comments
Flow router?
His router sounds more like a way of creating Tiered internet, something I want no part of. There IS a system of ensuring packets get where they are going now. Sounds like an opportunist throwing around his past credentials to sell a prodcut. I ask you this though, what has he done for us RECENTLY? HMMMM?I agree
I agree with the main focus of othis article. I believe we could do more to make the interent more managable and reliant.Greg, there is no mechnisim to ensure the packet gets there, there is one via tcp to ensure you know if one or more were lost but not that it all of them get there. If a packet is lost then there can be a reqest for another one
The "flow router" doesn't seem like its creating a teir, it sounds like QoS but an automatic QoS service nothing special but then again I don't think this article really understands its technical nature. For that router to create a teir it would also have to identify where it came from and is going to, rather or not there is a rule to slow it down and then if the destination has an agreement.