A World on IP

"The world’s communications are going IP at an ever increasing rate. All the world’s communications, data, video and voice are inexorably moving to software driven packet switched and in particular Internet Protocol based networks.

More specifically, the Internet and world wide web will continue to grow. Hundreds of millions of users will be added as lower priced personal computers and Internet capable mobile phones continue to spread to the billions of users.

The digital economy will be built on IP. To grasp the impact of this next generation Internet we need to consider how these computer-computer communications together with the human browsers will be used in all the growing areas of web communications.

Consider the effects in e-commerce, e-business, e-government, e-learning, e-health and e-entertainment. In certain countries massive traffic will be generated by e-science using mainly grid computing.

Universities and government think tanks have been developing Grid computing for the past decade. The software is now available as commercial products.

Just as the Internet started off in the universities and the Pentagon so too has Grid computing. Grid computing is software that can use the power and memory and storage of many computers large and small around the campus or around the world to solve massive computing tasks.

The grid architecture will become an extension of web services. It will use all the common items like XML, URI etc and will run on the Internet. It will use IP packets.

It will be a few years before the traffic from Grid computing hits the Internet in a big way. Because by then many grid services will use interactions betweens dozens of supercomputers and thousands of servers and PCs the traffic could be unbelievable.

The architectural requirement s or restraints needed for such network wide computing activity does not mean extra functionality “in the network”. Most of this work and innovation will be done, and can only be done “at the edges” of a “big fast dumb” network. "