He helped design and build the original Internet, but now Dr Larry Roberts says the Net has passed its use-by date and needs fixing.
Roberts, widely regarded as one of the four 'founding fathers' of the Internet (along with Leonard Kleinrock, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf), explained at a forum yesterday that the network was never designed for voice, video and other emerging services, while security 'must be improved in virtually all areas.'
Roberts explained that the original Internet design was limited by the high cost of memory, among other things, but said that those limitations were no longer valid. And he said that it was today's routers, rather than the Internet Protocol, that needed fixing.
'IP works perfectly but the routers weren't built to support it,' Roberts said, adding that flow-state memory, which is today economical, can be used in flow-based routers to achieve the low-packet loss needed for video and other streaming services.
'Voice turned out to be low enough bandwidth to be possible, but video is a different matter,' Roberts said. He argued that economic considerations also demand radical changes.
According to Roberts, Internet traffic is doubling every year, but the drop in router equipment prices through Moore's Law are not keeping pace. 'It means that the cost of the Internet is doubling every three years, and that cost can only be kept in check by major redesigns,' he said.