DNS - The Internet in Ten Years: Will it be Like This?

Every once in a while it's fun to blue sky, whiteboard, daydream, speculate, whatever verb you prefer, what the Internet could be in the future, and how to get there.

An interesting set of prophecies is put forth by industry observer Gary Marshall. Some of the highlights:

"There will be no crime, no malware and no fake online banking sites. Latency won't be a problem. High-definition video will be smooth, and buffering will be a distant, nightmarish memory. And that's not all."

But to make it happen, Marshall notes, "engineers merely need to rethink the way the internet works and change pretty much everything. What could be simpler?"

Marshall noted that there's one big change already underway: we're running out of IP addresses: "RIPE NCC's Managing Director Axel Pawlik noted in January that the pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses would run out as early as 2011. But the move to IPv6, which can handle around a trillion trillion trillion addresses is largely a software, not hardware, issue."

We think a trillion trillion trillion addresses might suffice, yes. For the next few years, anyway.

If we're late embracing IPv6, the Internet won't grind to a halt, Marshall says, the existing IP addresses will keep working, but it won't grow with quite such creative abandon either.

Already, Marshall says, "we're using the internet in ways its creators couldn't possibly have imagined, from the rise of video to the sheer number of connected devices." He cites Aaron Falk, Chair of the Internet Research Task Force and Engineering Lead with the Global Environment for Network Innovations (News - Alert) and a gentleman with an 8x11-sized business card, saying 'There are many areas where the current architecture is straining to meet the needs of the users."

The greatest concern, Marshall cites Falk saying, is not so much that today's traffic is challenged, "but that the ad-hoc machinery being inserted into the network will inhibit future innovations. I worry about tomorrow's applications more than today's.'

Falk's GENI itself might be were answers to these and other issues arises. Instead of using the actual Internet itself as a guinea pig, GENI, funded by the US National Science Foundation, is described by Marshall as "a (serious) playground where new ideas can be tested out."

One area of concern is routing tables, which the net's backbone routers use to direct online traffic. The border gateway protocol routing table has grown hugely, doubling in size between 2003 and 2009, and there are concerns that if the level of growth continues, router hardware won't be able to cope.

Stay tuned - should be interesting.