The Internet and World Wide Web: E-commerce Infrastructure

Internet II: The Future Infrastructure 133
Insight on Society: Yahoo France for a further look at the issue of government regulation
of the Internet.
3.3 INTERNET II: THE FUTURE INFRASTRUCTURE
To appreciate the benefits of Internet II, you must first understand the limitations of
the Internet’s current infrastructure.
LIMITATIONS OF INTERNET I
Much of the Internet’s current infrastructure is several decades old (equivalent to a
century in Internet time). It suffers from a number of limitations, including:
• Bandwidth limitations. There is insufficient capacity throughout the backbone, the
metropolitan switching centers, and most importantly, to the “last mile” to the
house and small business. The result is slow service (congestion) and a very limited
ability to handle video and voice traffic.
• Quality of service limitations. Today’s information packets take a circuitous route to
get to their final destinations. This creates the phenomenon of latency — delays
in messages caused by the uneven flow of information packets through the network.
In the case of e-mail, latency is not noticeable. However, with streaming
video and synchronous communication, such as a telephone call, latency is noticeable
to the user and perceived as “jerkiness” in movies or delays in voice communication.
Today’s Internet uses “best efforts” quality of service, (QOS), which makes
no guarantees about when or whether data will be delivered, and provides each
packet with the same level of service, no matter who the user is or what type of
data is contained in the packet. A higher level of service quality is required if the
Internet is to keep expanding into new services (such as video on demand or
telephony). (CSTB, 2000).
• Network architecture limitations. Today, a thousand requests for a single music track
from a central server will result in a thousand efforts by the server to download the
music to each requesting client. This slows down network performance as the
same music track is sent out a thousand times to clients that might be located in
the same metropolitan area. This is very different from television, where the program
is broadcast once to millions of homes.
• Language development limitations. HTML, the language of Web pages, is fine for text
and simple graphics, but poor at defining and communicating “rich documents”
such as databases, business documents, or graphics. The tags used to define an
HTML page are fixed and generic.
Now imagine an Internet at least 100 times as powerful as today’s Internet, an
Internet not subjected to the limitations of bandwidth, protocols, architecture, and
latency
delays in messages caused
by the uneven flow of
information packets
through the network