The Stone-Age Net

The Intel Developer Forum proceeded into its final day with yet another thought-provoking keynote from Intel Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Pat Gelsinger. During the keynote, Gelsinger, along with Vinton Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet", talked about the aging Internet and how it has changed little since the 1970s with the introduction of the TCP/IP protocols.

"To be really honest, I think it's still pretty primitive. I think we're still kind of in the stone-age when it comes to serious networking," said Vinton Cerf when asked what he thinks of the 30-year old Internet we have today. "There's a great deal more that has to be done. We have to explore alternatives and variations on the existing architecture and we need a way to do that," Cerf continued. It's true that the aging Internet architecture is in dire need of a major upgrade as it is increasingly required to accommodate the vast amount of users and applications that has been thrown at it since its invention about 30 years ago. The goal, of course, is to build an Internet which is safer, more useful, reliable and accessible – something that every user can say 'amen' to any one of these much needed attributes.

Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger discusses the aging Internet with Vinton Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet".

In order to upgrade the Internet architecture, we cannot just think about replacing the existing infrastructure as it involves the cooperation of countless organizations. While IPv6 was the solution to enhance the Net with a larger IP address pool supporting up to 670 quadrillion IP addresses, its slow present rate of adoption will probably take many more years to complete. With many more users and devices getting connected to the Internet (we now have more than 800 million users), one can see why the Internet is choking. It's not difficult to see why there's the capacity problem especially when we can expect billions more getting connected in the near future.

The situation gets worse when there are security issues which includes hackers attacking users with threats like Internet worms and viruses. New threats like cell-phone viruses and Wi-Fi intrusions are just some of the new security issues that plague users today. Research also has shown that security issues have doubled every year and it's increasing exponentially.