The Future Of The Internet

The internet has become part of the daily lives of millions and millions of users. In fact, most of us would have a difficult time going through our days without it.

- Jeff Finkelstein

We use it to communicate, research things, play games, watch sports, movies and homemade videos, handle our finances, babysit our kids and pets, shopping, food delivery, and more.

It is interesting that other than email, none of the ways we currently use the internet were considered when the original developers came up with the idea of creating an international network for communicating with others. At the time they were interested in creating an electronic version of the post office. What it has become is a way for us to interact with others at many different levels.

However, there are some concerns with the current architecture of the internet in that those services that require low-latency or high bandwidth cannot be guaranteed. The requirements of current and future applications need a deterministic and consistent network connection between end-points to deliver the applications both residential and business customers desire. For example;

Virtual reality requires 25 Mbps or greater throughput while maintaining a motion-to-photon latency of less than 20 ms

Industrial applications e.g. machine to machine or sensors to vehicles require between 25 µs and 10 ms

Tactile (haptic) applications require approximately 1 ms

Vehicular networks require between 500 µs and 5 ms latency

The internet as we know it today has no guarantee of packet delivery, let alone the deterministic latency required by bleeding edge applications.