"It's symmetry and bandwidth, stupid," said Gordon Bell, Internet pioneer and former Digital Equipment Corp. engineer, in explaining what he feels are the two greatest needs of the Internet in the coming years. Bell, a 1991 recipient of the National Medal of Technology, led the DEC design team that produced the VAX minicomputer and later headed the government team that developed the National Research and Education Network (NREN), an information highway precursor.
By symmetry, Bell means that the information flow on the Internet or any successor to it should run in all directions, not predominantly from a group of information providers to information consumers. By bandwidth, he means that the infrastructure has to be provided for transmitting hundreds or thousands of times more data volume than is now possible for most users.
Symmetry is needed, he said, because "Anyone should be able to be a producer of a consumer, and be able to send and receive equally." The more that becomes true for everyone, the better it will be for commerce, since participation will bring in more users, he said.
The need for bandwidth is obvious for transmission of high-quality audio and video-to a level of five million bits per second or higher to achieve good video transmission, Bell noted. Most home users now are limited to 14.4 kilobits per second. To achieve the goal, cable and telephone companies need to be pressured to provide high bandwidth, he said. "Get the phone guys to do it for us-they're getting paid for it anyway."
Bell said he's adamantly opposed to the cable TV model of one-way information for the National Information Infrastructure. "Cable TV is to the Internet as mainframes and SNA were to distributed processing. It turns users into couch potatoes and it's totally hierarchical."
Bell estimated that the Internet is now in 154 countries, consisting of 40,000 networks and 20 million to 40 million users. But the huge growth of Internet use has created a lot of hype that needs to be deflated, he added. With the world's population currently growing at 1.6 percent a year and Internet use doubling each year, Internet users would surpass the world population by 2003, he estimated. In some cases, Internet use hasn't even been productive. "The Internet is really Game Boy for adults, without the attendant improvement in hand-eye coordination," he said.
He defined the Internet's development as 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 versions. He called his NREN project Internet 1.0. NREN was an extension of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet), the Internet backbone, to provide real-time high-speed connectivity between government, commercial, and research institutions. In addition, it provided a fiber-optic network used as a test bed for high-speed communication and computer technology.
Internet 2.0 is what we have now, Bell said. What he hopes for is Internet 3.0, which would feature a universal digital dial tone for speedy transmission and 25 megabits per second of bandwidth at the home level. He said ISDN will be inadequate. "There are cable guys who can give us the bandwidth that we need and they'll get there a lot faster than the phone companies."