The Future Of The Internet

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Today internet is the most popular communication media and the main reason for that is internet is a free media as well as there are no person or authorities to own it. It belongs to the common people. There are organizations only to govern internet. And another reason for making internet decentralized is to make it free of threats and attacks.

One may think internet is the world wide web. But world wide web (WWW) is actually a part of internet. Internet is a collection of interconnected hardware devices and world wide web is a large database which contains all the web site data.

Internet Timeline

The Future of the Internet

When internet was designed it wasn’t targeted to cover all the millions of users and hold many features that we use in the internet today. Because of that developers develop the concepts like Next Generation Internet to allow lightning fast internet and widen the backbone.

All the researches which are done to update the technology in internet, paid off with the introduction of internet 2. And the backbone of the internet 2 is 100Gbps which is a vast bandwidth compared to the bandwidth we had earlier. This allowed everyone to surf the web fast. To addition of it, researchers are developing new technologies like IPv6 to allow the growth of the internet. And the new versions of QoS (Quality of Service) are also being developed and that will allow data packets to have various priority levels.

All these new technologies combined will enable to provide a fast experience in web surfing as well as the security level of the internet. There will be more to come in the future that will break boundries and innovate without limitations.

What is TCP/IP

TCP/IP is the basic communication language or protocol of the Internet. Almost all the communication through internet is based on this TCP/IP protocol and other protocols which are used heavily in internet functions with the help of TCP/IP protocol. For examples HTTP, TelNet and SMTP. The transmission can be done through an analog phone line to communicate using another protocol called Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) or Point to Point Protocol (PPP).

In 1974 Bob Khan and Vint Cerf published a magazine mentioning about the TCP which stands for Transmission Control Protocol. They were saying that this TCP method can connect different networks and bridge a connection between them with the help of gateways. Later TCP protocol was divided into two layers which are network layer and transport layer. Network layer is there to route data packets to different networks under the policies of Internet Protocol (IP). When data packet routing was only done by with the help of Internet Protocol data packet loss ratio was high due to its inability to transport all the data packets to its destination. Since IP is unreliable with its own there was another protocol developed just to make the method reliable. This is the second layer which is known as transport layer or else TCP.

What is TCP/IP Version 4?

In 1960s there was a demand for a network communication media between the universities just to maximize the utilization of resources and data transfer. The result was ARPANET which was began to use in 1968. ARPANET was developed by a United States government agency called Advanced Research Project Agency. In 1972 ARPANET was developed into DARPA.

TCP/IP was first used in ARPANET in 1971 and its successor, which is NCP (Network Control Protocol) was developed. Developers were thinking of another lower layer since the layers which were there cannot handle the data transfer of its own. The result was TCP/IPv4. It was embedded to ARPANET’s Request for Comment (RFC).

IP version 4 is using 32 bit and all the addresses in it are mentioned in binary numbers. All together it has 32 characters. In IP version 4, all the above mentioned 32 characters are divided into four octets. Following is an example. 10000000.11110000.10101011.10010100. This is hard to memorize so these binary numbers are converted into decimal. Ultimately an address would look like 192.168.1.1.

In IP version 4, there are 5 classes which are class A, class B, class C, class D and class E. This division was done by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) . And also this division is also done regarding to the number of hosts.

Examples for class A, class B and class C addresses are as follows. 10.0.0.1 , 140.2.1.1 , 192.168.1.1 , 240.0.1.1. Their subnet masks are as follows. 255.0.0.0 , 255.255.0.0 , 255.255.255.0. These are the classes we use mostly.

What is TCP/IP version 6?

IP version 6 is the new version of TCP/IP protocol. It is the successor of TCP/IP version 4. IP version 6 was first introduced by a organization named IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). This new version is basically developed to overcome the IP address exhaustion which affects IP version 4.

Why Do We Need IPv6?

The Internet is basically communicating with each other using TCP/IP protocol. To identify each of the devices connected to the internet, an IP address is needed. The IP version which is used up to now is IP version 4 which we began to use in 1981. IP version 4 only supports 4,294,967,296 (232) addressed and we are already used 96% of it and only 4% of the addresses are still available. We are more likely to run out of the available 4% of IP version 4 addressed in 5 years.

Since we are running out of IP addresses it was necessary to switch to a new IP version. IP version 6, which is also named IP Next Generation was the successor over IP version 4. People are much reluctant to switch into the new method since all the devices we use now support IP version 4. Because of that only 1% of people are using IP version 6.

The main reason for developers to develop a new IP version is that the earlier version had limitations in its addresses. Since IP version 6 is 128 bit, it can go up to 3.4×1038 addresses.

Why IPv6 adaption is slow?

For over 3 decades we have been using IP version 4 and with the time all the devices uses internet which were manufactured only support IP version 4. Because of that common people is reluctant to switch into a new IP version since their devices and applications won’t be supporting the new technology.

During the last few years vendors are making their products to support IP version 6. Because of this there has been some requests for IP version 6 address. For an example Google has supported their google map application to IP version 6 and right after that people who uses it has been switching to the new version of IP. When it comes to large companies they are reluctant to switch to IP version 6 because they have to turn off all the devices including security devices. This will enable hackers to hack into their systems. So a easier solution for switching to the new IP version is needed.