ADSL will get ?? % of connections ?? Amati's share ?
Saturday March 1 8:04 AM EST
Internet Pioneer Says Growth Explosive
PHILADELPHIA (Reuter) - A pioneering developer of the Internet says growth of the network has slowed at least temporarily, but remains at a blistering pace that will have 200 million computers connected to it by 2000.
"The actual growth rate has started to moderate a bit," said Vinton Cerf, senior vice president for Internet architecture at MCI Communications Corp. and a co-developer of the language "spoken" over the network by computers.
However, Cerf said Friday, the network will continue to mushroom in the coming decades as technology becomes cheaper and uses expand to such areas as appliance monitoring and control that could lead to multiple Internet devices in every home.
"We may actually have a total network connectivity market in the billions or even trillions," by 2040, Cerf told an Internet seminar at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school.
"I see an enormous explosion coming as you get the cost down for some of these devices," he told Reuters later.
Cerf said the growth rate of computers connected to the network had slowed from more than 100 percent per year in recent years to about 80 percent, and he had reduced his projection for Internet-linked devices to 200 million worldwide by 2000 from 300 million last year.
There were about 16 million computers connected to the Internet in January, he said. He said rough estimates last year placed the number of Internet users at about 35 million.
Asked after the seminar about factors behind the slowed growth, Cerf said he was not sure, but they could include a slowing of personal computer deliveries. "We may actually be seeing the 'early adopter syndrome' reaching its peak and the rest of the market is not ready to jump in," he said.
However, he said, Internet links with devices such as telephones already are appearing on the market, and bringing with them a vast potential new market. Multi-user video games, incorporating video-conferencing features, could be another major source of new Internet connections, he said.
And he said links between businesses who now have separate networks, such as manufacturers and their suppliers, would be a major new growth area. The automobile industry is now trying to develop such an external network, he said.
Cerf predicted that by the middle of the year 2000, the capacity needs for Internet data traffic on the telephone networks will surpass voice use, placing huge demands for expansion of the system, especially in the switches that route transmissions.
"The router technology is going to have difficulty keeping up...we are going to need some very big routers in order to carry this kind of traffic," he said.
Traffic on MCI's backbone Internet network grew at about 15 percent per month in 1996, Cerf said.
He said a potential source for new investment in capacity could be in electric utilities, which would have a strong financial incentive to connect to electricity-using devices in the home such as water heaters in order to moderate power demand in peak periods.
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