I’m on my way to Berlin tomorrow to participate in a meeting in which the main topic of disscussion is “Technical Challenges for the fuure internet”.
The bar has been set high, really in an attempt to engage the group and to see what really comes out of the session.
While preparing I came across two intersting articles.
The EDUCAUSE REVIEW | Lessons for the Future Internet: Learning from the Past, July/August 2006, Volume 41, Number 4 lays out the basic characteristics of the internet and then the author goes through and describes a few highlights of Internet development in the past 30 years, (In four stages) analyzes some of the policy factors at work in that development, and then suggests some avenues for research contributions to the evolution of the future Internet which include
Basic Research of networking and its underlying technologies
Advanced Network Facilities.
Universal Affordable Broadband.
Middleware (to provide a set of commonly needed software tools that interpose themselves between applications code and network facilities)
Preservation of the Internet Commons.
Also a report from ACMA (Austrialian Communications and Media Authority) called Vision 20/20: Future Scenarios for the Communications Industry – Implications for Regulation has a good insight into what is seen as the networking utopia – of ‘Internet Everywhere’ and it points out some chalenages such as the incentives for government, industry and users in realising the potential social and economic benefits of a world of pervasive communications – an
information-rich world of ever-present connectivity and distributed computational intelligence.