The chief internet evangelist and father of internet Vinton G Cerf was in Bangalore and gave a public presentation here in Bangalore on the past, present and future of internet.  Few of my colleagues attended the presentation.  Thanks to Narayanan, Sumanth and Prakash who summarized the presentation.

Vinton G. Cerf is the Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company.   Vinton spoke to a huge gathering on the topic - “A father speaks about his child’s past, present and future“.  Befitting the title of the session Vinton showed few glimpses of ARPANET (the past of internet), dealt on the effectiveness, speed, amount of data transferred using this ARPANET in the initial days.  Then he moved on to the present situation where the users of internet have almost increased tenfold.  He also showed the statistics regarding the usage of internet in the present day life and also connectivity across multiple electronic devices such as pc, mobiles, PDA’s …  Throughout he stressed upon that not just “Knowledge is Power” but “Sharing the Knowledge is Power” and he acknowledged that Google is committed to make it happen.  Vinton kindled few thoughts on how the future electronic devices could behave.  Be it programmed refrigerators that will e-Mail/SMS the owner about the contents that are stored or be it surfing board equipped with Laptop (supported by Wi-Fi) that helps the user to be connected through out.

With the kind of demand that is increasing rapidly, Vinton stressed on getting a structure to the scattered internet with more R&D on networking technologies like IPv6. With a standard disclaimer saying that Google is not involved in the project that he is leading, he spoke about his project “Inter Planetary Internet”.

Vinton showed the slides of this project which talks about a new way of transferring content/data with the help of other planetary systems like how a robot deployed in Mars sends the data back to earth. The constraint though is the existing protocol TCP/IP is not enough to get the expected response time because the transfer now has to happen in terms of astronomical distances which usually is about 4 to 20 minutes.  He mentioned that a new protocol Inter PlaNet (IPN) would be required to enable such a communication that will meet the required response time for data transfers.

Click on this link “About Inter Planetary Internet Project” to know more about it.