The need for speed

The story so far: you boot up your machine, dial about 35 times to connect to the Internet, surf at the niggardly speeds that the Indian ...

The story so far: you boot up your machine, dial about 35 times to connect to the Internet, surf at the niggardly speeds that the Indian phone system allows, and then get cut off when a switch at your local exchange trips. Sad story. Most Indians believe it to be an ethnic story as well. It just isn8217;t true. Setting aside the most telecommunications-capable countries, it8217;s more or less the same story for Internet users the world over.

About three years from now, the sad story may find a happy ending when Internet2 and the New Generation Internet NGI, now being developed in the US, are opened to the public. This billion-dollar network of networks is visualised as a place that will try to recapture the original spirit of the Internet: knowledge first, commerce afterwards. No ads, and lots of bandwidth for text, pictures, sound, video, television, telephony, fax and paging. So what else, you might well ask, is new?

True, the current Internet provides all these services, but it suffers from one tragic flaw: it is routed through the global phone system. The network out there is so large and so cumulatively intelligent that no one would be particularly surprised if one of these days, it started demanding an annual vacation.

The terminal on your desktop may look stupid, especially when it has to deliver a printout, but it is also rather smart.

The problem is that the phone system that connects the two is irretrievably dumb. Parts of it are convinced that they are living in the Edwardian Age. Apart from the advent of packet switching, there has been no fundamental change in a century.

Eventually, the new Net will not be dependent on the phone system. It will absorb it. Conversations, videoconferences, faxes and pager messages, the standard phone network traffic, will ride on Internet Protocol, the platform that now brings only the Internet to your desktop. Telephony, the biggest and most expensive legacy system in the world, will be slowly dismantled.

The new network will be a shock to the system. Running exclusively on high-speed fibre optic links, it is intended to deliver speeds up to a thousand times what your modem can handle. It should be able to transmit the entire contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a fraction of a second.

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More usefully, it will make possible the transmission of sensory data at the rate that true virtual reality calls for. Already, there is speculation that company executives from all over the world will be able to attend board meetings in tele-immersion8217;, connecting their desktops to create a room8217; that is as real as reality itself. The Internet we use today cannot deliver real cyberspace, the alternate reality that William Gibson writes of. But life on the new network will imitate art very, very closely.

The new Internet is going to change the way people think of communications. And it is going to begin the process of convergence between major media that was predicted as early as 1996.

However, the process promises to be slow because of the usual reason 8212; corporate gang-wars over standards. To get onto the new platform, old media will either have to mutate completely that8217;s an expensive, painful process or develop an interface. Corporates will seek to dominate the new markets by pushing their own interface.

It is a business model that seems to have outlived its usefulness. It8217;s ironic that most entertainment companies have a production-model high definition television HDTV but there8217;s no sign of a global market only because the standards are different. It8217;s a strategy that worked well enough for companies in audio, radio, TV and video.

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HDTV is the first sign that the market has changed. But big business is stupid enough to try it again with the new Internet. And as long as it can, it will hold true cyberspace at bay.