Building and Navigating the Information Highway

By Andrea Early

Special to the Gazette

Mario Vecchi wants to drive a Maserati on the Information Highway -- but the road is cluttered with traffic, it isn't large enough, and the speed limit is too slow. But as Vecchi -- vice president of networking at Time Warner -- and officials from MCI and the Electric Power Research Institute told a full-house audience, he and others in the communications business are building a highway that will impress even the fastest drivers.

The panel of experts, moderated by Dave Clark, senior research scientist in the Laboratory for Computer Science at M.I.T., discussed plans for increasing the bandwidth of the Internet so it will handle larger capacities of information faster and in real time.

For his part, Vecchi announced plans by Time Warner for LineRunner, an asymmetrical but high-speed, two-way cable modem that is currently being deployed to three major metropolitan cities with the goal of upgrading some 10 million computers by 1998. "I wanted to create a network that was not a bottleneck," said Vecchi. "There is hardly any machine out there that will keep up with the speed of what we'll provide."

Vinton Cerf, senior vice president, data architecture, at MCI Telecommunications Corp., is more interested in how efficiently the highways will connect than in how quickly he can navigate them.

But the same revamping of the Internet that Vecchi is after will also help Cerf provide the real-time connections that are in heavy demand from his company right now. "I think it's safe to say we are in the middle of a gold rush," said Cerf, who has seen the number of networks on the Internet double each year since 1988. "We're about to go into a wave where businesses will want to be interconnected. If we are to provide real-time quality of service, we have to increase the bandwidth. This is really a WYGWYG service, 'What You Get is What You Get.' "

Other issues of quality service that still need to be refined are those of cost and security. None of the panelists could say exactly how the multibillion dollar costs for this exciting new superhighway will be passed on, but all agreed that those costs will somehow be passed on to Internet users.

Ron Skelton, of the Electric Power Research Institute, suggested that the monthly meter and bill methods used by utilities might prove a good model for the Internet. Vecchi alluded to an as-yet-undefined flat fee billing scenario that will "not likely be based on connecting time."

"We'll encourage people to log in and never log off, or at least to stay on for a very long time," he said.

Security, the age-old problem of the Internet, remains an issue for the future. According to Vecchi, "It's a mess right now, and anything we can get from the next IP generation will be a real boost."

Skelton, too, expressed concerns about security issues and offered that authentication and encrypted payloads might help.

As for the long-term implications of this new and improved technology, Cerf offered some amusing thoughts. He believes that once interactive games go over the Internet, people will have a compelling need to hear and see their real-time conquests in action.

"Teleconferencing will be a funny side-effect of this," he said.

Cerf also suggested that someday in the not-so-distant future, Internet-smart appliances -- such as those that could receive a message from the electric company to slow down during a major power surge -- might really have a place in society.

Clark, the panel moderator and former chief protocol architect for the Internet, offered his thoughts on the new directions of the Internet. "I have a good feeling," he said. "There is a short-term sense that consumer Internet ventures are viable. A lot of people have decided they can make money and the technology has to play catch-up. Right now the Internet is like a toy, but what happens when the device that's on your desk gets smart? I think it could be very exciting."

But before Vecchi can drive his Maserati, and before Cerf can build his bridges and see his Internet-smart appliances, all of the panelists agreed that a global backbone will be essential for moving the Internet to the next stage -- and that will require larger providers such as Time Warner and MCI to work together, with other competitors, and with local providers.