• PC World
• » Networking & Wireless

Next Internet: Bigger, Faster, and Universal

What does half a decade amount to on the Net? A lot. Just five years ago, David Filo and Jerry Yang began the Yahoo list, Microsoft registered the domain name MSN.com, and Netscape released Navigator 1.0. Today there are more dot coms than one-armed bandits in Vegas, and 150 million to 200 million people are online. What a difference the Web makes.

So how will the Internet look in five more years? For starters, the Web will be bigger, flashier, and noisier.

Everybody in the Pool

As sure as bugs in a Windows program, more users will be on the Internet five years from now. According to research firm Jupiter Communications, only 37 percent of U.S. households were connected to the Net in 1998; by 2003 this figure will have risen to 63 percent--and that's a conservative estimate.

Despite the current wave of interest in broadband connections (through digital subscriber line, cable, or satellite modems), Jupiter Communications analyst Zia Daniell Wigder says less than 25 percent of future Internet users will connect to the Net that way, and widespread broadband use will take longer than most people expect. Analog dial-up connections will be free for the asking, Wigder says, and broadband companies will have to sell consumers on paying for a superfast Net connection.

But while companies duke it out for wired Net consumers, both camps risk being kayoed by technologies that let users connect with no filaments attached. A recent report sponsored by Nortel and published by the Yankee Group predicts that the number of wireless Internet users--connecting mainly through wireless telephone networks--will grow from 3 million today to 50 million by 2004.

The proliferation of users will also increase data flow. Ameritech, a Southwestern Bell company, runs the Chicago network access point, one of a handful in the nation that ties the Internet together. Andy Schmidt, the company's senior product manager for the Chicago NAP service, says that peak volumes of data traffic (currently flowing at 2.5 gigabits per second) across that NAP have doubled every six to eight months for the last two years.

Will the Web backbone snap under all that weight? "I don't foresee any impending blackout," says Rick Miller, Internet backbone analyst for the research firm Cahners In-Stat. Miller says that enough bandwidth is available today to accommodate growth. But some industry observers warn that the Net could get bogged down as video, audio, and other rich media become more popular. To keep up, we may need "a 100 to 1000-fold improvement in the backbone, and each server may need to be 100 to 1000 times faster," says Abdelsalam Heddaya, vice president of research and architecture at Boston-based Infolibria. Alternatively, Infolibria sells streaming-media software that bypasses the Net backbone altogether by duplicating Web video and audio files on Internet service provider servers.

The Internet, Part Two

Of course, there's a big difference between having enough bandwidth available for the entire Internet and having it available to you when you need it. As the Internet has become increasingly commercial and crowded, its original users--academics and researchers--have had a harder time accessing the communication lines. To mitigate this problem, developers of a new project called Internet2 have set aside miles of fiber-optic cable to devote to researchers' use and to serve as a test bed for future Internet applications and technologies. The project's participants, which include Nortel, Qwest, and Cisco, expect technologies developed and refined there to facilitate searches on the Internet, improve the reliability of streaming data (video, audio, and the like), and generally create a more stable Net.

Until now, the biggest obstacle to delivering high-quality multimedia over the Internet has been the straw-sized connections that funnel data through the Net. But even the narrowest consumer broadband connections will be roughly ten times faster than the average 56-kbps analog modem. Fatter connections mean wilder, more graphic-intensive Web sites loaded with streaming video and audio clips. Net shopping for everything from clothes to cars will begin to resemble the real-world activity, since buyers will be able to look at products in detail--probably in 3D.

Shopping won't be the only area of change. In the future, you may get most of your entertainment--movies, music, videos--and news on the Internet. Who knows? By the time George Lucas finishes the next installment of his Star Wars prequel, you may be able to watch the fall of Anakin Skywalker entirely from the Net.

But the greatest gains offered by broadband connections may be around-the-clock access to data, resulting in an Internet that is always on in your house. For instance, instead of having to instruct Quicken to surf your bank's Web site and download your transactions, future versions of the program may retrieve the data as the bank's computer processes it. Combine this with the trend toward home networking, and your future abode is likely to contain lots of application-specific devices--all wired to the Net. The very concept of "going online" may give way to an era of instant, universal communication.

mars.com

"Within ten years, the two-planet Interplanetary Internet will be in operation with several satellites in orbit around Mars. Many robots will have been landed on the surface and at least one e-mail server [to communicate with them] will likely be on the planet. As many as 2 billion users will be on the Internet, and that many devices will be on the network as well. Intelligent devices will be a normal part of daily life, performing functions for us such as ordering [groceries]...as we occupy ourselves with less mundane matters."