Internet pioneer wants to take the Net via planet

Vint Cerf takes seriously its title of Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is floury in different projects to bring the next version of the Internet in the world--or in some cases, beyond the world and in the solar system. One of his pet projects includes an extraterrestrial Internet that uses a protocol other than IP.

Cerf sat down with Cisco Subnet editor of network world, Julie Bort, at the annual Conference of the digital broadband migration in Boulder, Colo., to discuss the interplanetary Internet, cloud computing standards, the Semantic Web and other topics.

PART 1: Cerf: future of the Internet does not include a IPv7

Interview: Podcast and transcript

About a year ago, she started talking a lot about a concept called "Interplanetary Internet" stretching the Internet so that it can reach outer space. What can you share about that project?

Photo: courtesy of GoogleIt happenings. It's not using the Internet Protocol. Is using the new Protocol package that was developed as part of the more general concept of delay-and disruption-tolerant network-.

Since 1998 we have recognized that traditional Internet design was implicit in the idea that there was good and relatively low latency connectivity, while in an environment of space, when it comes to interplanetary distances, there are delays and the speed of light can be minutes to days. We need this new Bundle Protocol to overcome the latencies and disconnects that occur in, from celestial movement [and by] orbit satellites.

Bundle protocols are running onboard the international space station. I am running into a number of locations around the United States, in the laboratories of NASA and in academia. There is something called the bone Bundle, which is the backbone of IPv6, which connects a lot of these research activities, one to another. There is at least somewhat experimental Bundle Protocol implementation for the Android operating system, but is not production quality, so that he really needs to be redone/revisited.

There is one called EPOXI spacecraft called the probe Deep Impact (it fired a penetrator in a comet in a few years ago, in order to expose the internal analysis with spectrographic oils analysis). The probe is still in orbit around the Sun and just visited comet Hartley 2 November 2010. We have uploaded the interplanetary probe and protocols that we did their tests to about 80 seconds.

So in 2011, our initiative you qualify "space" protocols in order to standardize them and make them available to all interplanetary space faring countries. If you have chosen to adopt them, and potentially every probe launched by that time will be weaved from a communications standpoint. But perhaps more important, when the spacecraft have completed their primary missions, if they are still functionally operable--have power, computer, communications--can become nodes on an interplanetary backbone. So what can happen over time, is that we can literally grow an interplanetary network capable of supporting both human and robotic exploration.

Part of the motivation for everything that has more space exploration until now has been supported by links to radio point-to-point. We see much more complex missions that need a richer communications environment. We also found that due to the tolerance for delay-and-disruption, we can get data back from the scientific mission.

Here on Earth, Google is engaged in numerous projects of speeding up Internet "such as the new Internet Protocol called SPDY. Should we pay attention to SPDY and there is much support for it?

Yes, you should pay attention. These are efforts by Google to make more efficient implementations of the Internet. A lot of this stuff is available via open source. You don't need many people to Google to make something happen, that is what's so cool about Google. You have a little "Sherpa Team" that actually does this job.

There must be a lot of talk about the Semantic Web is used. It is still hot--or not?

Well, I don't know if it's still hot. I can tell you that Tim Berners-Lee is still very, very determined. He calls "deep linking" now and is related to how you identify data on the network so that we can converge or Conjoin data from disparate sources and still make sense. My impression is that it's a hard slog, and is going for almost a decade now. But Tim has been successful in the past, so it would not exclude this as a potential successful, but it's a long way.

Last year, you were talking about very standard cloud, and now it seems that OpenStack Rackspace had a groundswell of support. You can declare a winner?

It does not declare a winner yet, and it's not because I have no preference for something else. By my count, there must be 25 or 30 different groups that are looking at cloud-based standards. The real problem is going to be implementing and testing. Until we get some serious experience in the clouds to interact with others in various ways, I think we don't know what works and what doesn't.

All these efforts are laudable, but they are going to have to be in the real world before we can declare any winner. There is a real issue of features we're looking for.

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ITU wants to help the Government to avoid the bottleneck Mobile

Whitespace devices, LTE, femtocells, Wi-Fi automatic handover, optimized backhaul networks: wireless operators already distributes a wide range of techniques to increase the speed of the flow of data to our Smartphones, and equipment manufacturers are showing many more at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

But all this still won't be sufficient to ensure that the data continues to flow, as the number of Smartphone rises from 500 million to almost two billion by 2015, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations.

ITU wants Governments to act now, additional spectrum licenses for mobile communication networks and making it easier for operators of fixed networks intended to roll out fibre links that mobile operators need to connect to the growing number of mobile phone base stations.

"Mobile operators have invested billions to upgrade and improve capacity and performance of their networks, but in some cities with a high rate of use, as San Francisco, New York and London, we're seeing more users frustrated by chronic problems of network outages," Secretary General Mr Hamadoun Touré ITU warned Friday.

If help more government intervention is questionable: for the city of high-use Touré CITES, Governments are already well ahead of the pack.

One of the strategies that he suggests, forcing TV stations to switch to digital transmitters more efficient, freeing up spectrum for other uses, has already been adopted in the United States and United Kingdom. In 2008, the Government of the United States to auction former analogue TV spectrum in the band 700 MHz and Verizon Wireless has already started to offer its mobile broadband service LTE (Long Term Evolution) in New York, San Francisco and other cities.

The United Kingdom too has analog TV transmitters turned off (France will follow suit this year) and is the roll-out of fibre-optic connections at home: as many as 600,000 Uk homes could be connected to fiber later this year.

While analogue TV spectrum was an easy target, other frequencies may be released for mobile communications. For convenient mass produce mobile telephones and modem, but the same frequencies must be available on all continents. This availability is decided at the World Radiocommunication Conference, a three-week event intergovernmental-long, organized by the ITU every three or four years. The last WRC ended on November 16, 2007: the next begins on January 23, 2012, in Geneva, and mobile operators will undoubtedly keep a very close eye on the debates.

Peter Sayer covers open source software, the legislation on intellectual property and General technology breaking news for IDG News Service. Send comments and suggestions of news to Peter at peter_sayer@idg.com.