Danny Amor's Online Library/Danny Amor's Online Library - Volume 1.iso/html/society/pub/speeches/net.services.keynote.rutkowski

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Internetworking:
Critical Information Infrastructure

Keynote Address

The Network Services Conference 1993
Warsaw, Poland
12-14 October 1993

Anthony M. Rutkowski
Vice-President, Internet Society
Director, Sprint International


On the way to this beautiful city in the
homeland of my grandparents and countless
generations of ancestors, I had the opportunity
to visit a former institutional home in Geneva -
the International Telecommunication Union.
There, the Secretary-General, other Union
officials, and staff from nearby international
organizations invited me to make a
presentation and discuss with them "the
internetworking revolution."  Many of these
organizations are now heavy users of the
Internet.  They all wanted to know: What is
happening?  Why is it happening?

It's a common phenomenon these days.  Last
week, Wall Street Journal Television - which is
doing a special program on the Internet -
visited Internet Society headquarters asking the
same questions.  The week prior to that, the
World Bank held its first Internetworking
seminar at its Washington headquarters and
announced that the case was so compelling for
its implementation and use, that numerous
new internal and external initiatives were
being rolled out.

Even the annual almanac of the telecom-
munication world - TeleGeography - is inserting
a special section on internetworking for the
first time in the 1993 edition.

Someone recently did a string search for
articles in major USA public newspapers and
magazines and come up with the remarkable
statistic that there were more than 170 articles
on Internet during this past summer.

My standard initial reply to queries about
this subject is simple but dramatic -
Internetworking  is one of the most
revolutionary technologies of the 20th century;
Internetworking is perhaps THE most
revolutionary human communications medium
that has yet emerged.

Why is this so?  What is it so remarkable
about internetworking?  Is this exaggerated?

I think not.  And, the answer is not just that
it's an important technology and major new
business sector, but rather it's a critical
enabling infrastructure for institutions, for
professions, for people, for countries, for
creative genius itself.

In many respects, it is the enabling side of
this phenomenon that is more important than
the technology.

Internetworking is a destroyer of time and of
space.  It removes institutional walls.  It is a
changer of paradigms.

Indeed, this spirit of individual enablement is
reflected in the marvelous titles of some of the
presentations at this conference: Sowing the
Networking Seed, User Network Interface to
Everything, Networks as Tools for Hunting
Historical Treasures, Networked Collaborative
Environments - to name but a few.

What I hope to share with you today is a an
overview of current global developments to
emphasize the importance of this conference in
furthering the internetworking paradigm, and
the significance of your individual and
collective efforts in bringing it about.

It shouldn't escape our notice that Warsaw is
certainly an appropriate venue for this focus,
for it was only a few years ago that the actions
of other motivated people meeting in this city
and country brought about another kind of
paradigm shift benefiting both individual
freedom and critical enabling infrastructure!

               *****

Internetworking is its own revolution

In it's broadest manifestation, the Internet is
a global mesh of information, information
processes, and people.  It is flat information
space where any organization, person or
computer can almost  instantly discover,
receive from, or transmit to - any other
organizations or persons or computers with
scalable high performance and low cost.
Nearly twenty million people, one thousand
processes and two million computers - now
exist in one vast worldwide  information space.

The accompanying first set of slides are
intended to provide a flavour of the
measurable dynamics and trends of the
internetworking environment today.  The real
significance of all this lies not so much in the
technology and the growth of internets, but in
what's happening "on top" of this mesh - that
is, what institutions and people around the
world are doing with these capabilities.
Nonetheless, because "connectivity is its own
reward," these metrics do provide a measure of
the scale and pace of the activity that is
captured in the slogan

The Internet is its own revolution

At the outset, it is important to emphasize
that the revolution taking place is not solely
limited to a specific technology or
implementation.  Because The Internet is
literally the connectivity among many diverse
networks, it is all of them collectively that
provide the aggregate benefit.  Unfortunately
the statistics don't really account for the
additional growth of the rest of  the broader
Internet "Matrix" which includes Bitnet, UUCP
networks, Fidonets or the gateways to most
major public and private messaging systems in
the world.  Collectively they now provide
access among 137 countries and territories.

IP Internets.  We shouldn't overlook that
even the implementation of presently
unconnected enterprise internets results in
major scales of economy, and provides those
independent internets with "plug and play"
capability when they are ready for global
Internet connectivity.  This important trend is
seen, for example, in the metrics for IP
registered addresses where we can note that
less than one-third of the registered internets
appear to have connectivity to the popular
USA NSFNet backbone.

Thus the announcement by Microsoft a few
weeks ago at Interop that its enterprise
networking strategy was based on TCP/IP, and
the shipment the same week of the next
generation Windows operating system NT with
internet protocols "shipped in the box," will
certainly have a dramatic effect as PCs all over
the world reboot asking for their owners to
feed them their Internet addresses.

By analyzing the IP registration data base
over the past six months, it has been possible
for the first time to develop some
comprehension where the near-term growth of
IP internets is going.  Clearly most of the
growth - about 60 percent - is coming from
commercial network registrations.  In the USA,
that figure is 70%.  Other interesting trends
include very fast growth rates of education
internets, and significant  increases in
government networks.  Overall, more than
2000 networks a month are now being
registered by the RIPE European NIC, the new
Asia-Pacific NIC, and the USA NIC.

Internet Connectivity.  One of the most
meaningful internet metrics is that of
connected networks.  It's measure is imperfect
because the best you can do is to look at the
networks "seen" by the major backbones like
the NSFNet or the CERNExchange.

The whole conceptualization of the Internet -
even in IP internet terms - was recast a few
months ago by the discovery by a joint CERN-
Merit team that the CERNExchange in the
month of March saw 1 040 more networks than
the NSFNet in the same period.

As we have come to expect, the Internet
continues to grow at a seemingly perennial rate
of 10 percent per month - month after month,
year after year. But, something new is
occurring.  What was largely a USA
phenomenon has taken off worldwide.  Not
only is the current monthly growth rate of
networks outside the USA 50 percent greater
than in the USA, but also by June of 1994 at the
present rates, most of the IP internets will exist
outside the USA.  Indeed, if the Bitnet and
UUCP network infrastructures were considered
in these figures, already the globalization
crossover point has already occurred.

Internet Hosts.  In the final analysis, it's
Internet hosts rather than networks that
provide real information and people
connectivity.  Mark Lottor's famous quarterly
"walks around the Internet" provide the
benchmarks and trends for host connectivity.

Like other metrics, it's still incomplete
because it cannot reach hosts on non-IP
internet infrastructures or hidden behind
gateways.  But it does provide a fairly good
approximation of host connectivity.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of
this trend is its consistency over the past 12
years - as the number have just kept increasing
from a handful to nearly 2 million machines.
Whether you look long-term or short-term or
in any region or country - the growth
continues.

Over the past 12-18 months, most notable
increases from a globalization perspective have
been developing countries in general, and
Central & Eastern European countries in
particular.

Internet traffic.  The last major metric
category is internet traffic.  As expected, with
connected networks and hosts increasing at ten
percent per month, the traffic is increasing
globally as well.  Major backbones like the
NSFNet are currently transiting nearly 8
Terabytes per month and regularly jumping up
another Terabyte.  The commercial and
European regional backbones seem to be
humming along - just under a Terabyte per
month.

I think the global traffic remains a fascinating
metric.   Nearly every connected country
engages in somewhere between one and one
hundred Gigabytes of traffic per month to the
NSFNet backbone.  For nearly every country,
the traffic growth has ranged between 800 and
2000 percent per year.  Traffic through the
CERN Exchange backbone has similarly risen
dramatically.

These statistics alone are a testimony to the
significance of internetworking infrastructure
throughout the world.  Global communities of
people and institutions are sharing ideas and
information, they are collaborating on
important professional, academic, social, and
commercial developments - with a speed, ease,
and scale that did not exist even two years ago.

I think one of the best recent measures of this
critical infrastructure realization is what is
unfolding inside one of the old behemoths of
the computer industry - IBM.  Two years ago it
began a crash program to provide Internet
connectivity to every professional employee.  It
has been providing accounts to nearly 1000
employees a week, and in a recent survey, most
professionals believed internet connectivity
was important to their career.

Internet Services.  There is an unfortunate
misunderstanding among the general public
that  internetworking is used just for pen pal
kinds of  activity or as a high-speed substitute
for telex.

Less known is that the Internet currently
supports more than 1000 different kinds of
computer services, although only about 400 are
defined, registered services, and only a few
dozen are in really widespread use.  The rest
are largely experimental or specialize gateways
between different kinds of computer networks.

Most of the traffic - around 50 percent - is file
transfers.  Internetworking allows extremely
fast and easy movement of files, including
"binary" files that constitute the software or
special files used by computer programs.  Not
surprisingly, some of the Internet sites with the
heaviest global traffic are those used for
distributing new versions of software.

The full scope of all the existing and
emerging services today is worth listing:

 Basic Services - that include file transfers, e-
 mail and remote login to a distant computer.

 Mailing lists and bulletin board services that
 allow personal feeds of information.

 Interactive information delivery services
 that allow personal browsing.  Services like
 Gopher, World Wide Web, and WAIS have
 been growing at annual rates exceeding one
 thousand percent

 Directory services that allow finding people

 Indexing services that allow finding
 information

 Active agents that allow automated
 gathering of information of which
 Knowbots are the most celebrated example.

 Network management to monitor and
 control networks and devices.

 Commercial electronic data that allow the
 exchange of commercial business records.
 The new Internet Merchantilism Initiative
 and Enterprise Integration network promise
 the rapid introduction of widespread
 interchange of commercial business data
 and forms.

 Applied encryption technology that allows
 property and monetary transactions and
 privacy enhanced mail.

 Multimedia capabilities that allow
 broadcasting and even entertainment

 Mobile capabilities that allow transparent
 connectivity on the move.  The appearance
 of Personal Digital Assistants over the past
 few months and truly lightweight notepad
 PCs promises to fuel widespread mobile
 access.

              *****

What's driving the internetwork
phenomenon?

One of the most oft-asked questions today is
"what's driving this revolution?"  The answers
are simple.

 TCP/IP protocols & applications came
 bundled with every Unix workstation -
 now virtually all the operating for PCs
 include the protocols.

 Internetworking coincided with enterprise
 internetworking revolution.

 Standards and applications were developed
 by the best standards process in the
 business with highly desirable
 characteristics such as speed, user driven,
 innovative, proven standards, openness,
 international scope, and rapid
 dissemination of the specifications and
 even code.

 User costs are very low due to "Sender
 keep all" accounting, inherently low-cost
 technology being employed, and
 institutional cost sharing.

 Massive global connectivity & professional
 use.

 Ability to directly reach any computer and
 process.

 Very high performance.

             *****

Who uses the internet?

The second most asked question seems to be
"who uses the Internet?"  In short, nearly
everyone:

 Institutions of all kinds - commercial,
 academic, and government - to allow their
 staff to collaborate with peers, to rapidly
 coordinate complex, dispersed worldwide
 activities; to gather and share information;
 by interconnecting their enterprise networks
 via Internet backbone providers

 Professional communities of all kinds -
 especially research and development
 organizations

 Business enterprises which specialize in
 providing or collecting information

 General public via local access providers
 and gateways to commercial public e-mail
 carriers and other kinds of networks

                   *****

Why "critical information infrastructure"?

One of the more interesting remarks made at
the 1991 INET conference were those of the
former deputy head of the USA White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy, Gene
Wong.  He surprised people by stating that
today, the USA was a developing country, for
its institutions and people were just beginning
the process of internetworking discovery and
development - together with much of the rest
of the world.

Although there has indeed been considerable
focus under the new USA administration on
internetworking as critical national
information infrastructure over the past few
months; perhaps even more significant were
the findings and initiatives announced by the
World Bank at its first internetworking seminar
three weeks ago.

Drawing on the World Bank findings - as
well as the experiences of the past few years,
it's possible to list specific factors that indeed
make internetworking critical not only to
countries, but to institutions and professional
and social activities as well.

Scalability and robustness.  One of the more
remarkable characteristics of internetworking
is the ability to use so many different
technologies and platforms at all different
levels - transport, network, and application.
You can use whatever exists or is economical.

In some places that means low-end DOS or
Unix boxes using dialup lines for Fidonets or
UUCP networks.  It means Bitnets were there's
an existing infrastructure of IBM machines.  Or
it scales to the high end with FDDI LANS, high
performance routers and  DS3 or ATM pipes.

One of the world's great unsung testimonies
to the inventive genius of people yearning to
internetwork is what our friends and
colleagues in Central and Eastern Europe and
Russia have done to done to assemble vast
functional internetworks that squeeze every bit
from the available infrastructure.

Unfortunately, internetworking's robustness
in the adaptive routing domain has even
caused futile export control laws to be applied
which are hopefully now becoming a thing of
the past.

Leapfrogging.  Internetworking provides a
way to work with and work around existing
infrastructure.  There is nothing that can
intrinsically retard the introduction of
internetworking technologies and applications
- - except for unenlightened authorities that
impose artificial high cost cost, standards, or
export barriers.

Other Infrastructure Support.  Internet-
working is the means for countries to much
better support the growth and development of
nearly all other basic national infrastructures -
a phenomenon noted in recent World Bank
studies.

Access to Resources.  Internetworking
provides instantaneous access to resources -
which include not only an estimated several
Terabytes of information, but also an enormous
numbers of specialists in different professional
fields.  For example, a few months ago, a plea
by the World Health Organization on Internet
global medical discussion groups for someone
familiar with the unusual symptoms of a little
girl produced a tropical disease specialist who
produced a diagnosis and recommended
medication that possibly saved the child's life.

Critical Skills.  Internetworking - in a kind of
self-propagating manner - allows large
numbers of computer, networking, and
telecommunications students and business
personnel to acquire the skills and familiarity
with the technology to allow its introduction
and proliferation on a wide scale.  It also
allows specialized professionals and
researchers in all fields to "stay home" because
they can practice their profession and interact
with colleagues worldwide on the network.
This factor  was, for example, one of the prime
motivations behind the Australian AARNET
initiative to connect every corner of that vast
continent.

Business Orientation.  One of the more
significant factors mentioned by the World
Bank was the importance of having the
necessary infrastructure and orientation to
support a market-oriented economy.
Internetworking accomplishes this rather
admirably, and it's no secret that most of the
world's banks and financial institutions not
only have their own internal internetworks,
but are increasingly using the world's Internet
mesh to do business as well.

Funding Sources.  The increasingly
recognized importance of internetworking has
led a wide variety of agencies and foundations
and even private companies around the world
to fund many diverse internetworking
initiatives and infrastructures - domestically
and internationally.  France, Italy, the CEC,
and the USA have, for example, been
aggressive in pursuing major international
initiatives.   The donors for this conference
- - of course - are particularly notable
examples of this trend!

Motivated Community.  And lastly, the
internetworking community must be one of the
most enthusiastic and devoted in the world.  So
many of you here are representative of this
amazing global phenomenon that has resulted
in so many people spending so many hours
and so much creative energy in scaling the
availability and use of these technologies.

Why?  I suppose that it's because
internetworking is dramatically changing the
world in so many ways, because it is both
business and fun at the same time, and because
it is possible to see rather quickly the tangible
benefits of one's own individual endeavours.

                 *****

Where are we heading - An Internetwork
Renaissance

Based on every indicator, continued
exponential movement can be expected along
what I call the three major axes of
internetworking infrastructure: performance,
ubiquity, and application.

On the ubiquity front, it is certainly fun to
contemplate John Quarterman's famous
extrapolations of Internet users and the human
population and fantasize about their meeting
in the year 2001 in a world where everyone
and every human activity are networked.

That's not likely to happen, however, even if
internetworking may become very extensive.
Access to all forms of electronic communication
is pretty much a function of GNP and relative
need - and mere survival is still a problem for
much of the world. On the other hand, as the
World Bank noted, there are significant societal
support systems that are dramatically
enhanced by internet connectivity, and those
are beginning to find their way into many
remote corners of the world.

With the introduction of simple high-speed
dialup nationwide and even worldwide "free-
phone" internet services (which I'm actually
beta-testing), will significantly scale ubiquitous
access.  Other indicators are the continuing
massive institutional connectivity of businesses,
government agencies, and schools; the
appearance of the "MacDonalds" style local
Internet kiosks; the converters that turn Cable
TV systems into Ethernets; and the satellite
systems that will allow so many 3rd and 4th
world countries to continue to connect.

On the performance front, already there are
experimental implementations of IP running at
near Gigabit per second rates, as well as over
ATM.  Increasing liberalization and
competition worldwide of telecoms should
begin forcing the availability of raw leased
circuit bandwidth from stratospheric levels
down toward cost.

And lastly but most significantly on the
application front, the availability of
internetworking tools on mass market PC
platforms combined with the massive
professional and institutional connectivity
should produce the equivalent of an Internet-
working Renaissance the likes of which
the world has never witnessed!

                *****