VINT CERF'S BANDWIDTH WORRIES
[Good opportunity for ASND GRF router sales]
herring.com
VINT CERF'S BANDWIDTH WORRIES
By Dan Mitchell
April 7, 1998
Demand for bandwidth will continue to grow, and that
makes for some nervous mornings for Vint Cerf, the
"father of the Internet."
"Every morning, I worry" that the Net's routers will be
unable to handle increasing data loads, Mr. Cerf told the
crowd at the Red Herring's Herring on the Enterprise
conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
And bandwidth demand won't be met by the deployment of fiber cable alone, according to Mr. Cerf, who runs
MCI's Internet operations. "The problem is not the fiber;
the problem is the routers." What is needed, he said, is a
"BFR" (where "B" stands for "big" and "R" stands for
router). By the end of the year, Mr. Cerf anticipates that
"we will have at least one router [that moves data] at
multigigabit speeds." And we'd better, he added,
because by the end of the year so much data will be
pushed onto the Net that current infrastructure will not be
able to handle it. "This requires at least one miracle" from
routermakers such as Cisco, said Mr. Cerf. "I need that
BFR so I can build a BFN," (where "B" stands for "big"
and "N" stands for "network").
Among the biggest bandwidth-hogs, Mr. Cerf said, will
be extranets. Corporations are piling on to create
networks that run atop the public Net and extend outside
the corporate firewall to customers, suppliers, and
remote employees. For instance, MCI itself has recently
entered into huge deals with the U.S. Postal Service, for
which the company is building a 30,000-node network;
and the Nasdaq stock exchange, for which MCI is
building a system that can handle loads of real-time
securities transactions. Companies are learning that
dedicated, proprietary networks increasingly "won't
make any economic sense," he said.
Remote opportunities
For all these reasons, Mr. Cerf noted, opportunities abound for vendors of firewalls, cryptographic systems, and remote-access services.
The "key technical challenge," to fully functional remote
networks, he said, is to replicate all the data and
functionality housed on a worker's desktop PC on a
remote computer. To do that effectively, he said, we
must "extend the firewall's ability to protect the traffic."
Also, remote machines must function as a "Swiss Army
knife," with instant adaptability to various types of
connections, including analog dialup, ISDN, and cable
modems.
Also, he said, new networks such as local area networks
in hotels and wireless systems need to be built out to
increase connectivity. "Plainly ... you need to bring an
amalgam of different technologies together" for remote
connectivity to work at its full potential, he said. |
