Convert Wireless Routers into Access Points

Don't throw out your old 802.11g gear just yet. Though 802.11n provides faster speeds and longer range, your aged legacy equipment can still serve a purpose.

As we'll discuss in this tutorial, old wireless routers can be turned into access points (APs); they can help increase the Wi-Fi footprint even more. Plus they might even help increase the performance of the 802.11n connections on your network.

Wireless Routers and APs Aren't the Same

Before going further, it's important to understand the difference between a wireless router and an AP. First off, wireless routers contain an AP. In addition to the AP functionality, a wireless router provides the routing between clients and the Internet. This makes it possible for multiple computers to access one big network, the Internet. Secondly, routers have a DHCP server. This server gives each client an IP address, which is required for network connectivity. Without the routing and DHCP features, a wireless router would simply be an AP; if a wireless router didn't have an AP, it would just be a wired router.

On most networks, only one router is needed. Then to extend the wireless coverage, APs can be plugged into the router or switches. These APs aren't as "smart." They only provide Wi-Fi access; the router still does most of the network management.

Get Additional Coverage And/or Separate the 802.11G Clients

After we do the magic, we'll plug the old wireless router into the new one, to serve as another AP. Then if the old router is properly placed (by running an Ethernet cable), it can nearly double the coverage area provided by the new router. Of course, 802.11n clients that connect to the 802.11g router won't run at 11n rates of speed and performance, but the old router is earning its keep by providing "free coverage."

There's a small catch the other way though; it's better that the 802.11g clients only connect to the 802.11g router. When they connect to 11n routers, the performance of the n clients is negatively effected. However, again, the additional coverage is better than nothing, even just for the old clients.

You can still benefit from keeping your old gear if you don't have a long Ethernet cable or you don't want to run it through the building. Even if the old router is placed close to the new one and it doesn't provide additional coverage, it can still serve as the AP for the 802.11g clients. This way the new router can be set to only allow 802.11n connections, so the old clients won't connect and degrade the performance.

Performing the Conversion

In addition to changing general settings, turning a wireless router into an access point consists of disabling its DHCP server and hooking it up to the new router correctly. Start by configuring the general settings. Plug in the old router (but don't connect it to the new router yet) and log into the Web-based configuration utility by typing its IP address into a Web browser. Then at least configure the following settings:

• IP Address: Change the IP address to be within the subnet of the new router. For example, if the new router's IP is 192.168.0.1, the old router could be set to 192.168.0.2.
• Channel: Change the channel to one of the three non-overlapping channels, 1, 6, or 11, while making sure any coexisting or overlapping routers or APs aren't set to the same channel.
• SSID: Typically, all the APs of a network should have the same SSID, so roaming works when clients move around and change APs. However, if roaming isn't crucial, think about setting the old 802.11g router to a different network name. This can help the users distinguish between the g and n access; especially useful if performance is important.
• Security: Remember to set up encryption, preferably WPA or WPA2, on all the wireless routers and APs.

To turn off the DHCP server, find the DHCP settings, usually on the main or network tab. There should be a check box or something similar to toggle the server on and off; disable it. Then make sure to save the changes.

When the configuration is done, put the old router in place. Then connect an Ethernet cable between them, plugging into the regular Ethernet ports of each. Do not connect it to the old router's Internet/WAN port.

Conversion Complete

We did it; now we should have greater coverage area and/or performance. We disabled the routing features of the old wireless router, turning it into a basic AP. If there are more old routers lying around, consider other projects, too. The DD-WRT replacement firmware, for example, has a repeater feature and CoovaAP includes hotspot features.

Top 10 basic wireless security practices

Wireless security is a hot topic these days, and different advice abounds. Here's a short checklist to make sure you have the basics covered:

1. Use vendor-supplied security -- Since the capabilities of each wireless router/access point/bridge differ from brand to brand, it's best to get the vendor's recommendation on the best security options for their devices



2. Change the default admin password of your wireless router/access point/bridge -- Once a potential attacker detects a wireless network, this is one of the easiest ways to further compromise it.



3. Turn down the power -- Some vendor's wireless router/access point/bridge's offer the option of changing the power settings so that your wireless network is not broadcasting its signal farther than you really need it to.



4. Use Media Access Control (MAC) address filtering and Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) -- MAC address filtering will help restrict access to your home wireless network to only those users you authorize. If WEP is the only security option available on your wireless router/access point/bridge, use a key that is hard to guess and change it periodically.



5. Consult the vendor about antenna positioning -- Different antennas radiate signal in different patterns. Check your vendor's documentation to verify optimal antenna positioning for your wireless network.

And Protection Firewall or Viruses

1. Change SSID and, if possible, disable SSID broadcast -- Your wireless router/access point/bridge may come with a default SSID already configured. Change it as soon as you set up your wireless network. Also, some vendor's may offer the option of not broadcasting this network identifier.


2. Keep your wireless router/access point/bridge firmware up to date -- New firmware can help resolve compatibility problems, plug security holes and provide other important fixes. Check the vendor's Web site for these updates.



3. Use a VPN for working at home -- For enterprise users working at home, always check with your enterprise IT department or help desk for best practices regarding accessing the company network over your wireless home network. Often, virtual private network (VPN) software is required for this purpose.



4. Keep your antivirus software up to date -- Viruses, worms and Trojans are a continuous threat. Make sure your wireless network is not a haven for these problems.



5. Use a firewall -- Either a hardware or software firewall can help protect your computer and the rest of your network from attack.

Internet Root Nameserver

An Internet Root Nameserver (also known as a Root Name Server) is a domain name service server which redirects requests for Top Level Domains to that specific domain, be it .com, .org, .net, .co, .tv or any other domain.

In a typical domain service request, where a computer wants to resolve a domain name to an IP address, it works from right to left. Let's suppose we want to resolve the domain in www.somewhere.com. First, there is an implied dot just to the right of the "last" word, .com. This implied dot is never needed, because the domain name service automatically fills this in for the address. So, our address is really www.somewhere.com.[blank space]. The blank space is the root domain and contained in the root domain (although a private company may have their own private root servers) are the well-known top level domain names, like: .com, .org, or .net. Other top level domain names have been added in recent years, but these three are the most common.

So, we are resolving a domain, www.somewhere.com.[blank space]. We are already in the root ([blank space]) because we are on the Internet. Working from right to left, the next thing we come to is the .com. The Internet knows how to direct to the .com servers from the information it has stored. The .com servers contain information about the "somewhere" domain and lastly, the "somewhere" servers answer queries for the subordinate addresses such as "www" translating the information into an IP Address.

There are thirteen Internet Root Nameservers, six of which are located in the USA and others which are physically anywhere in the globe. Seven of these are distributed using Anycast software. DNS lookups to the root nameservers are relatively rare, since the information is all cached. The Internet Root Nameservers have names with just one letter, from "a" to "m" and all have an IPV4 address. Nine of these servers have an IPV6 address too.

Design Structured Cabling Systems and IT wireless Network Infrastructures

Introduction

Designing a Structured Cabling System - a ten step HOWTO guide

Steps

Below we have provided a ten step introductory guide for the Design of Structured Cabling Systems and IT Network Infrastructures. (see structured cabling schematic)

Step 1: Which group of standards will you conform to?

European Union CENELEC EN standards America ANSI/TIA/EIA standards Canada CSA standards Australia/New Zealand AS/NZ standards Rest of the World ISO/IEC standards

The three principle design standards give the details of how to design and specify a structured cabling standard, they are;

ISO 11801
EN 50173
TIA/EIA 568-A or 568-B

BICSI


These standards in turn however refer to hundreds of other standards relating to component specifications, fire performance, testing methods, containment systems etc.

Step 2: Horizontal cabling - Basic rules

Four-pair cables are run from user positions to a patch panel. At the patch panel, patchcords link into the active LAN equipment or into backbone cabling. The user position has a wall outlet or floor outlet, and this links into the PC on your desk via another patchcord. The outlet is a called a TO (Telecommunications Outlet) and contains an eight way plug meeting IEC 60603-7, more commonly referred to as an RJ-45.

• Two outlets per work area
• Two outlets per 10 square metres of useable floor space
• Outlets to be within 3 metres of the user station
• Both outlets to be RJ 45
• Max cable run to be 90 m
• Max total length of patchcords at both ends of the link to be 10 m
• Cable and RJ45 to be Cat5e grade

Options

Cat 3 or optical fibre can be used

If optical fibre, select 50/125 or 62.5/125 multimode

If using fibre select SC or ST connectors

Cat 6/Class E can be specified

Cat 5e Cable can be unscreened, UTP, Foil screened, FTP, or Foil and Braid screened S-FTP.

Cable fire performance can be:

1. IEC 332-1
2. IEC 332-1, IEC 754, IEC 1034
3. IEC 332-3-c. IEC 754, IEC 1034
4. UL 910 plenum

Each grade, in ascending order, has a better performance in fire situations but at a correspondingly higher price.

The exact density of cables, number of outlets and their position is up to the end user, or else at the proposal of the installer/designer

Step 3: Backbone Cabling

All of the horizontal cables are star-wired back to Telecommunications Closets or Floor Distributors where they are terminated in patch panels. These patch panels are connected together via the building backbone cabling which can be up to 500 metres long. It can be copper cable but is more likely to be optical fibre, either multimode or singlemode. The kind of cables and the number of cores needs to be decided.If fibre is chosen, a loss budget should help you make your decision

Step 4: Campus Cabling

The campus cabling links different buildings together. It can be up to 1500 m long. It can be copper cable but is more likely to be optical fibre, either multimode or singlemode. The kind of cables and the number of cores needs to be decided.

Step 5: Positioning and design of Telecommunications Closets to link horizontal and backbone cabling.

Positioning and design of the equipment room as a central focus for the main computing, LAN and PABX equipment.

Positioning and design of the Service Entrance facility whereby outdoor cables are terminated and the point of demarcation between customer owned equipment and the PTT cables is defined.

Step 6: Cable containment system

How will the cables be protected? Within buildings the choices are:

• Cable trays
• wire basket/raceway
• cable ladders
• J hooks
• conduit
• dado rails
• PVC trunking
• built-in underfloor duct
• raised floors
• suspended ceilings

The following must be taken into account:

• the density and volume of cables to be organised
• the aesthetic appearance of the cabling within offices and other visible areas
• economics of different schemes
• proximity to power cables and other potential sources of interference
• firestopping

Useful standards are:

• TIA/EIA 569 Commercial building standard for telecommunications pathways and spaces
• EN 50174 Information technology – cabling installation

For external applications the choices are:

• underground cable ducts
• direct buried cable trench
• concrete cable trough
• self supporting aerial cable
• supported aerial cable, i.e. catenary or messenger wire
• fixed to building exteriors

In all cases the designer must ensure that all civils work has been carried out, rights of way established and availability of cable ducts and manholes established. Aerial cable routes must keep a minimum distance away from power cables and all external cables must be selected for the environment and temperature ranges in which they are expected to survive. External copper cables usually need to be protected by overvoltage and fault current devices where they enter a building.

Step 7: Cable Administration system

The cabling and its containment system need to be clearly identified and their locations, routes and capabilities recorded in a cable administration system. This usually involves a logical numbering scheme that can be applied to all cables, outlets, patch panels and even containment systems. Various colour schemes are also available.

These schemes can be paper based but for the larger installations then a computer based system is advisable. There are several proprietary solutions on the market which offer various database and graphical methods for keeping track of cabling assets. Some systems are also active in that they can detect moves and changes and automatically update the database.

Useful standards are:

• TIA/EIA-606 Administration standard for the telecommunications infrastructure of commercial buildings
• EN 50174 Information technology – cabling installation

Step 8: Earthing Scheme

All exposed metallic elements of the cable system and cable containment system need to be earthed (grounded) for safety and also electromagnetic compatibility requirements. If screened cables are used then special attention must be given to effective bonding of the screening elements. Poorly earthed screened cabling may behave worse than unscreened cabling.

An electrically ‘clean’ earth must be available at all points where the cabling is terminated, but especially within telecommunication closets, equipment rooms and service entrances. A clean earth is usually defined as a conductive element with not more than 1 volt rms potential difference between it and the real earth down below. Copper cabling linking two different buildings can suffer from earth loops if the ground potential is different. Non-metallic optical cabling is usually picked for problem areas such as these.

Some useful standards are:

• PrEN50303 Application of equipotential bonding and earthing at premises with information technology equipment
• PrEN50174-2 Information Technology, Cabling installation, part 2, Installation, planning and practices inside buildings
• TIA/EIA-607 Commercial Building Grounding and Bonding Requirements for Telecommunications

Step 9: Testing regime

All cables must be tested to demonstrate compliance with the standards and specification to which they were bought. Testing can be split into copper cable testing and optical fibre testing. Ideally all cables should be 100% tested.

Copper cables.

There are five manufacturers of hand held copper cable testers that will automatically test the installed cable plant for all the expected parameters. By the use of a remote injector, the cabling is tested from both ends, which is a condition of the standards. The cabling has to pass all of the suite of tests to be awarded and overall pass. Points to remember are;

What is being tested? the channel (i.e. end-to-end including all the patchcords) or the basic link (i.e. the permanently installed cable from outlet to patchpanel). The test figures are different for each setting. It is usually more practical to test the basic link (also referred to as the permanent link).

What level is being tested? The tester should normally be set to Cat5e link or Class E link if Category 6 cable is being used.

The results are stored electronically and must be in a format recognisable by the cable management software that comes with the tester. There are now numerous test standards and draft standards. The most influential is likely to be;

IEC 61935 Generic specification for the testing of balanced generic cabling in accordance with ISO/IEC 11801

The tests required are; IEC 61935 Wire Map X Attenuation X; NEXT pair to pair X; NEXT Powersum X; ELFEXT air to pair X; ELFEXT Powersum X; Return Loss X; Propagation Delay X; Delay Skew X;DC Loop Resistance X. Cable length and ACR are also useful additions to this set of tests.

Optical cables

All that needs to be tested with short distance multimode optical cables is attenuation. This can be achieved by a device called a light source and power meter. This device will simply measure the absolute loss across the optical link. This then has to be compared with the design value of attenuation. If the tested value is less than the design value then the link can be seen to be acceptable.

Optical Time Domain Reflectometers can give a great deal of information about optical fibres, but for short haul multimode fibre they are an expensive overkill that gives results that need expert interpretation. An OTDR remains an essential tool for fault finding.

Step 10: Final thoughts

Is the design of the cabling system in-step with the LAN aspirations of the end user? For example, Cat5e is the minimum performance grade suitable for gigabit Ethernet. Standard Cat5 cable may not have sufficient delay skew performance for RGB video systems however. Cat 6 cabling will give a longer service life due to its higher performance, but at an initial higher cost.

Some optical fibre LANs, e.g. gigabit Ethernet cannot transmit over the full distance allowed in standards based optical structured cabling. These LAN limitations have to be taken into account. The next generation of 10 gigabit Ethernet will need a new generation of optical fibre to make it work.

The best way to ensure success in a structured cabling installation is to use properly trained people to design, implement and test the system. The RCDD qualification from BICSI is the only qualification which covers all aspects of structured cabling design and implementation.

The above information is offered as a summary of ISO 11801 and related standards. It is not a definitive design guide and does not replace study and implementation of the Standards themselves. The publisher accepts no responsibility for inaccuracies or omissions. To purchase the full Standards go to your national standards body, e.g. British Standards Institution, Nederlands Normalisatie Instituut etc. or ISO.

Wireless Network Management

Wireless Network Management refers to use of software tools designed to enhance performance, reliability and security of wireless networks particularly by diagnosing, detecting and reducing sources of radio frequency interference. Unlike in case of wired networks, where the redundancy of the equipment can be applied to mitigate the impact of performance problems and network failures to some extent, the wireless networking have a very limited options owing to availability of very limited wireless spectrum and the effects of wireless interference.

The factors that can have impact on the wireless network performance include traffic flows, working of the network topologies and network protocols, hardware, software and also, the environmental conditions. Therefore, often the Wireless users can be subjected to problems such as lack of coverage, intermittent discontinuity and difficult to monitor security aspects.

Wireless Network Management systems help to ensure network availability, as well as to provide other maintenance tasks, such as performance monitoring, testing, and fault management.

Some of the tools for Wireless Network management are Colubris MultiService Access Points (Maps), Airwave Management Platform (AMP) and Wireless Management Suite, wireless network management spectrum analysis software from Cognio Inc., Radio IP MTG, Cisco’s suite of Wireless Network management products etc.

wireless application service provider

A wireless application service provider (WASP) is part of a growing industry sector resulting from the convergence of two trends: wireless communications and the outsourcing of services. A WASP performs the same service for wireless clients as a regular application service provider (ASP) does for wired clients: it provides Web-based access to applications and services that would otherwise have to be stored locally. The main difference with WASP is that it enables customers to access the service from a variety of wireless devices, such as a smartphone or personal digital assistant (PDA).

Although the business world is increasingly mobile, many corporations are resisting the idea of wireless communication, because of concerns about set-up and maintenance costs and the need for in-house expertise. WASPs offer businesses the advantages of wireless service with less expense and fewer risks. Because mobile applications are subscribed to, rather than purchased, up-front costs are lower; because the WASP provides support, staffing and training costs are lower.

WASP services may include:

• Constant system monitoring
• Diagnostics and resolution
• User support
• Text formatting for various devices
• Problem detection and reporting

There are still issues to be resolved. Coverage areas remain limited, for example, and data synchronization among devices can be problematic. Nevertheless, WASPs provide an easier, safer, and cheaper way for organizations to add mobile components, and a number of major companies are opting for them. UPS, Sprint, and eBay are among the early subscribers to WASP services. Interestingly, some ASPs have begun to offer WASP services, while others are purchasing them.

Advantages and Disadvantages of WLANs ( Wireless / Wifi )

WLANs have advantages and disadvantages when compared with wired LANs. A WLAN will make it simple to add or move workstations and to install access points to provide connectivity in areas where it is difficult to lay cable. Temporary or semipermanent buildings that are in range of an access point can be wirelessly connected to a LAN to give these buildings connectivity. Where computer labs are used in schools, the computers (laptops) could be put on a mobile cart and wheeled from classroom to classroom, provided they are in range of access points. Wired network points would be needed for each of the access points. A WLAN has some specific advantages:

• It is easier to add or move workstations.

• It is easier to provide connectivity in areas where it is difficult to lay cable.

• Installation is fast and easy, and it can eliminate the need to pull cable through walls and ceilings.

• Access to the network can be from anywhere within range of an access point.

• Portable or semipermanent buildings can be connected using a WLAN.

• Although the initial investment required for WLAN hardware can be similar to the cost of wired LAN hardware, installation expenses can be significantly lower.

• When a facility is located on more than one site (such as on two sides of a road), a directional antenna can be used to avoid digging trenches under roads to connect the sites.

• In historic buildings where traditional cabling would compromise the façade, a WLAN can avoid the need to drill holes in walls.

• Long-term cost benefits can be found in dynamic environments requiring frequent moves and changes.

WLANs also have some disadvantages:

• As the number of computers using the network increases, the data transfer rate to each computer will decrease accordingly.

• As standards change, it may be necessary to replace wireless cards and/or access points.

• Lower wireless bandwidth means some applications such as video streaming will be more effective on a wired LAN.

• Security is more difficult to guarantee and requires configuration.

• Devices will only operate at a limited distance from an access point, with the distance determined by the standard used and buildings and other obstacles between the access point and the user.

• A wired LAN is most likely to be required to provide a backbone to the WLAN; a WLAN should be a supplement to a wired LAN and not a complete solution.

• Long-term cost benefits are harder to achieve in static environments that require few moves and changes.

Multi-tech wireless broadband

Combining cellular network, WiMAX, and Wi-Fi

Balancing cost, performance, and resource utilization drive technological convergence. Inevitably the merger of WWAN (3GPP/3GPP2 cellular network), WMAN (WiMAX), and WLAN (Wi-Fi) will form the future technological backbone of wireless broadband networks. Moreover, Mesh backhaul will encompass various wireless devices within an enormous optical fiber broadband network.

WWAN, WMAN, and WLAN possess idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses. The access rate of the GPRS is dozens of Kbps, while Wi-Fi can range between dozens and even hundreds of Mbps. The coverage range of GPRS is tens of kilometers, compared with Wi-Fi's modest range of less than 100 meters. At the same access rate, GPRS supports a mobile speed of up to hundreds of kilometers per hour, yet Wi-Fi is notably sluggish. Considerable differences also arise in cost: the cost per bit or service charge of GPRS is remarkably high, while Wi-Fi is almost free.

While WWAN, WMAN, and WLAN have their specific core applications, the three can be mutually supplementary. Cellular networks such as GPRS/EDGE/EVDO/HSPA/LTE offer broad coverage, roaming capability, and high-speed mobility. Wi-Fi and Mobility Ad Hoc are the most suitable for high-rate and large-volume indoor data services after being upgraded to carrier-class. WiMAX can be regarded as an upgraded version of 3G Packet Switching (PS), a quasi-4G version, or an upgraded version of Wi-Fi. Integrating the advantages of both cellular and Wi-Fi networks, WiMAX represents an optimum technology for MAN coverage, with hybrid networking of micro and macro BTSs.

End users are most concerned with the balance of price and quality, and the latter is mostly judged by download rates. A convergence-oriented combination of technologies is urgently required to satisfy subscribers' increasingly stringent demands on fees, performance, coverage, and mobility. Moreover, these demands span multiple networks that are embraced by a range of different standards.

For example, subscribers can expect low cost and high speed Wi-Fi or WiMAX access in the home, while Wi-Fi hotspot coverage or WiMAX is more suitable for airports or other places where broadband access needs to have a wider range and guaranteed throughput. In areas that lack Wi-Fi or WiMAX, cellular networks can maintain basic service availability. Undoubtedly, the resulting QoE will be consistently high and seamless, and the intelligent combination of technologies will be welcomed by subscribers.

wireless broadband networks

In future wireless broadband networks, an open terminal, or Intelligent Internet Device (IID), will act as a portal. It will integrate services and provide customer experiences. IIDs can access networks through different air interfaces and use only one widget or button for a given service application, including voice and data services. Data services in the 3G/4G era will be as popular as SMS in the 2G era. Unlike voice and SMS, data services have spawned from the Internet, and are therefore more diversified, complex, and flexible.

In the future wireless broadband market, we can predict that:

• The voice service will lose its dominant position and become a basic service. The technical threshold of SIP-based VoIP will continue to decrease, and most SPs will provide a VoIP "button". Voice services–and especially VoIP–will supplement other services in the same way that voice currently supplements IM in MSN. The traditional telecom operation mode that only provides a voice service will vanish.

• Streaming media will play an even more pivotal role in data services. The ARPU (for data and voice) of streaming media will be replaced by other indices such as average bandwidth speed (ABWS) and the average bandwidth consumption per month (ABWC). In addition, a greater range of business models will accommodate ARPU of data services. Listing services top-down in terms of requirements on network transmission quality yields the following order: online games, real-time videos, voice services, streaming media, Web browsing, and non-real-time services (such as FTP, BT, SMTP/POP). These services have different requirements for network indices such as jitter, delay, bandwidth, QoS, QoE, and security. Streaming media most closely bonds the requirements of subscribers and the provisioning capability of networks. As a key broadband data service, it will no doubt increase popularity among subscribers, and consume the major share of bandwidth resources.

Spectrum resources will be the key

The spectrum is inherently a rare resource. Shannon's theory holds that channel capacity is influenced by two factors: spectrum bandwidth and SNR. It is impossible to fully eliminate noise, and increases in signal strength are limited. Hence, spectrum resources are vital to meeting the increasing demand of subscribers for wireless data traffic volumes.

In most countries, high quality spectrum resources have been historically occupied by narrowband voice, radio, and television. This includes most civil spectrum resources and a certain amount of dedicated spectrum resources for the military, civil aviation, railway, security industries, and for radio and television. In future, these high quality spectrum resources will be gradually released for new communication technologies applications, albeit as part of a very slow process. This is the reason why the white-space spectrum is so valuable.

Among existing, advanced wireless broadband technologies, HSPA and WiMAX possess the advantages of precocity. In contrast to other technologies, the two have a developmental window of opportunity spanning 3 to 4 years, and will be allocated frequency resources before other technologies. The application of HSPA can target the personal mobile broadband (MBB) market, while WiMAX can focus on home and enterprise broadband services. In consideration of market competition and investment protection, HSPA and WiMAX will form significant wireless broadband technologies in the coming years.

New technologies and concepts

Cloud computing

For many years, computing resources have been exploited and expanded in the information and communication field to compensate for the dearth and expense of bandwidth resources. Increases in bandwidth availability coupled with a decrease in costs will soon bring the advantages of cloud computing into sharper relief. If the majority of core computing resources gather into a "cloud", only simple processing tasks such as optimizing visual and aural effects are required at the client level to provide high QoE at low cost. The cloud model thus centralizes resources, simplifies their reuse and management, and enhances efficiency.

However, cloud computing visits problems on customization and diversity. Though the model gathers computing and digital media resources into the cloud, meeting individual requirements either via the same cloud or through different clouds is another matter entirely. The solution, however, lies with tailor-made and personalized portals that allow subscribers to use any type of terminal to obtain a personal, mobile homepage, which is application-ready and can be customized.

Accessing information through cloud computing is similar to Paying with Plastic in that the terminal resembles an intelligent credit card, resource clouds mirror virtual banks and Internet stores, and the wireless broadband network forms an ATM or POS. Subscribers store home pages and access these banks and stores through a unique personal network ID (or what we refer to as a "communication fingerprint"). The private ID database, home page database, widget stores of network applications, and resource and settlement platforms all describe new NEs that exist under cloud computing architecture.

While cloud computing may be useful in specific contexts such as computing and for applications in dedicated networks, it has little impact on the architecture of wireless broadband networks.

Mesh and SON

The Mesh and Self-Organizing Network(SON) technologies fall under the same category. The SON technology deploys auto-configuration, auto-discovery, auto-organization, and multi-hop routing to form an SON comprising independent nodes. When network topology changes or links disconnect, the SON technology's self-healing and self-organization capabilities guarantee network connectivity and can optimize network-wide performance.

The wireless Mesh is a multi-hop network that has evolved from an Ad Hoc network. Mesh technology connects independent network nodes to optimize overall performance. The expectation on intelligent Mesh technology is relatively logical as disorganized networks must demonstrate a "clear and logical thinking ability" to manage a host of complex networks, efficiently interconnect independent network nodes, and facilitate their inter-communication.

At present, disorganized networks such as Wi-Fi networks cannot realize a greater "sense of organization" than cellular networks. We hope that the future application of intelligent Mesh technology can arrange these disorganized networks into a complex, SON capable of improving the performance across entire networks.

The future of wireless broadband

Wireless broadband aims to provide universal access (UA) and always broadband connection (ABC) services anytime, at any place, and across any heterogeneous network using any terminal.

Wireless broadband incorporates numerous technologies including multiple types of cellular technology, fixed and nomadic wireless access, wireless LAN, and even Bluetooth. Combined with All-IP technology, wireless broadband networks can provide broadband wireless access for subscribers in both low and high speed mobile environments. Wireless broadband can seamlessly transit between cellular systems, regional wireless networks, and radio/television/satellite communication systems.

Wireless broadband networks must optimally combine various technologies to enhance end user's QoE. In the future, wireless broadband is expected to provide a minimum single-user rate of 2×768 Kbps, or data and protocol rates of 1Mbps/m². It is clear that only a hybrid wireless network is adequate to deliver a mobile, economical broadband service, since single mode networking lacks the capability. The handover between heterogeneous networks (or vertical handover) in hybrid networking will shatter the restrictions on improving applications and performance that occurs in the handover between homogeneous networks (horizontal handover). By using a single terminal based on open wireless architecture (OWA), the end users can drive through network boundaries, realize UA and ABC, and then enjoy broadband services and applications anytime, at any location, and through any network.

Combining technologies invariably present unexpected difficulties, while the breakthrough of these difficulties can deliver surprising benefits. For example, the problems associated with Wi-Fi operation and inter-network roaming will be gradually solved, and this will greatly improve the popularization of Wi-Fi. The real end-to-end (E2E) application of wireless broadband will emerge after holistic technological maturity allows a single terminal to seamlessly roam among multiple networks of different standards. This will indeed represent a milestone feat, and is a colorful vision that motivates industry players.

Wi-Fi speeds into the future

NEWS.COM VISION SERIES 3--When Vic Hayes was designing wireless networks inside Toronto auto plants, he had an inkling about the potential for the technology. Throughout the 1990s, the Dutch native kept at his labour of love, which earned him the sobriquet of father of Wi-Fi.

Hayes, who oversaw the first working group to draft what became the 802.11b standard, has since played a leading role in shepherding the development of the Wi-Fi technology used by an estimated 8 million wireless networks in US homes and offices. Although Wi-Fi has turned into one of the hottest young technologies, Hayes says the real excitement will start after the computer industry hurdles the 100mbps (megabits per second) speed barrier.

How fast will Wi-Fi become?

It's hard to say, but compare it to the wired industry. The Internet was 10 megabits (per second) for a very long time. Then they went to 100 megabits. Now it's at 1 gigabit, and soon, 10 gigabits. If you extrapolate that to wireless, the dream might be also going in that direction--as soon as we get spectrum, though.

Can Wi-Fi attain that speed and still have a 300-foot range?

It will likely work over distances. When we were working very hard on the first standard, the thought was that the best you could do was 2 megabits. It has to do with reflections. It's like a big cathedral, when a reverend is talking too fast. You can't hear it anymore because one syllable is overthrown by syllables he spoke a few seconds ago. He has to talk slowly to be able to be heard.

So what's going to be the biggest technology impediment to the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi?

Technology-wise I do not see any impediment. The main impediment is the market and the investment to develop the market. Wi-Fi will come to business use in laptops, anyway. It is just a matter of using it and installing access points in offices.

Given that there's scarcity of spectrum, how do we get any more of it? Is that even possible?

There is spectrum in the higher frequency range, but the technology is still too expensive for the markets. In the current spectrum, we can still find ways to share with the users that have the spectrum allocated. Currently, we are conducting sharing studies with the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) in the 5470 to 5725MHz area.

You're talking about breaking the gigabit barrier. How fast do you think Wi-Fi transmission rates can reasonably become by the year 2005?

By 2005, I estimate that we reach over the 100mbps speed. IEEE 802.11 currently has a study group that is looking into asking for a project authorisation.

What's realistic? Once we reach that level, do you think that it will change the way we work and communicate using technology?

We would have much more visual information and animation in our daily tasks and answers to questions. We would get an explanation of how to mount a part in an assembly. Or the warehouse picker, the one that picks up and collects devices in a warehouse, would rather see the device he has to pick up on a screen than have to look for a part number.

What industries that don't use wireless will incorporate it into their next class of devices?

It is likely they will be integrated into home-automation and energy-control systems, letting users know how to use sun or wind energy at the best time, how to bake the best apple pie or rinse laundry using the least amount of detergent.

What sorts of devices do you think will include wireless capability that you don't currently find using the technology?

Anything that needs communications or control will be wirelessly connected--from your freezer to the TV, from the light switch to the most sophisticated laptop. Wireless will be ubiquitous.

Is it just a matter of smaller, faster, cheaper--or will there be something on a breakthrough level?

For one thing, making the devices smaller, faster and cheaper will enable a breakthrough by itself.

Like what?

Spectrum is the most scarce resource. We need more than there is (currently) available. What is available has already been given out to multiple users and services. To make the use of the spectrum more efficient, and yet share it with other users, will be the most important achievement.

You say wireless technology will get built into anything that needs communications for control. But considering where we are today, that sounds like a huge undertaking. How long do you think this will take and what will be needed to make it happen?

It will depend on whether the entrepreneurs see a market in it.

Won't that always be the case, or is there something standing in the way of what could potentially become a huge industry?

Sure. In this case, the turning point will depend on price versus savings, or ease of use and installing the control devices. I am looking backward, say, around 1970. There was a huge difference between an office machine and a computer, a chip and a computer, a PBX (telephone network equipment) and a computer. I saw the differences fading away.

Computers are now the main engines in office equipment like copiers. A computer on a chip is the reality and a PBX is a special-purpose computer. You will see computers entering into (kitchen) ranges, into the internal heating and cooling, and the climate control. All will have wireless communications for control. Where the breakthrough would be is unknown to me.

When you say wireless will be everywhere, do you mean that literally--for instance, the capability will get built into wristwatches?

Again, that is just a matter of which entrepreneur will develop which market.

Will this likely come from the entrepreneurial community or will it be something that established industries, for instance, watchmakers will clasp onto?

Established industries could very well be the entrepreneurs in this case. They hold the know-how of the market and the channels. And they need to be innovative to keep market share. There seems to be no limit to the kind of device that can be wireless. Does the world need a wireless washing machine? There are limits, but even a washing machine can be integrated in a domestic energy-control program to balance the energy used when available and when most effective.

When you were developing what became Wi-Fi, how large were your ambitions. What was your realistic expectation?

I personally wanted to have it everywhere.

Does Wi-Fi have a boundary?

A study group was just set up in 802.11 (standards committee) for going beyond 100 megabits. There's still some research to see how to further use the frequencies and radios. It would either need a bigger, more powerful cell (radio) or lots of little ones. We're not very keen on making a big cell, which has lots of frequency needs. We'd rather have smaller cells, which don't use as much frequency. You have to create additional frequency out of nothing, like reusing the frequency.

Why do it?

People are speed-hungry. If you see what is possible nowadays with streaming video, then you really need it. Streaming needs to go beyond 11mbps to be successful. There are more applications that are bit-rate hungry.

From gopher to the WWW

Main articles: History of the World Wide Web and World Wide Web

As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being able to accommodate all the existing data types and in being able to grow without bottlenecks.^{[citation needed]}

One of the most promising user interface paradigms during this period was hypertext. The technology had been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "Memex" and developed through Ted Nelson's research on Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS. Many small self-contained hypertext systems had been created before, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard. Gopher became the first commonly-used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way.

In 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee invented a network-based implementation of the hypertext concept. By releasing his invention to public use, he ensured the technology would become widespread. For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium technology prize in 2004. One early popular web browser, modeled after HyperCard, was ViolaWWW.

A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill. Indeed, Mosaic's graphical interface soon became more popular than Gopher, which at the time was primarily text-based, and the WWW became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet. (Gore's reference to his role in "creating the Internet", however, was ridiculed in his presidential election campaign. See the full article Al Gore and information technology).

Mosaic was eventually superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which replaced Mosaic as the world's most popular browser. While it held this title for some time, eventually competition from Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely displaced it. Another important event held on January 11, 1994, was The Superhighway Summit at UCLA's Royce Hall. This was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the Information Superhighway and its implications."

24 Hours in Cyberspace, "the largest one-day online event" (February 8, 1996) up to that date, took place on the then-active website, cyber24.com. It was headed by photographer Rick Smolan. A photographic exhibition was unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History on January 23, 1997, featuring 70 photos from the project.

Search engines

Main article: Search engine (computing)

Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web but all continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There are still Gopher servers as of 2006, although there are a great many more web servers. As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines. Database size, which had been a significant marketing feature through the early 2000s, was similarly displaced by emphasis on relevancy ranking, the methods by which search engines attempt to sort the best results first. Relevancy ranking first became a major issue circa 1996, when it became apparent that it was impractical to review full lists of results. Consequently, algorithms for relevancy ranking have continuously improved. Google's PageRank method for ordering the results has received the most press, but all major search engines continually refine their ranking methodologies with a view toward improving the ordering of results. As of 2006, search engine rankings are more important than ever, so much so that an industry has developed ("search engine optimizers", or "SEO") to help web-developers improve their search ranking, and an entire body of case law has developed around matters that affect search engine rankings, such as use of trademarks in metatags. The sale of search rankings by some search engines has also created controversy among librarians and consumer advocates. As of June 3, 2009, Microsoft launched its own search engine. Bing became immediately popular with the masses searching the internet. It has multiple sites belonging to separate countries e.g. the United States version is different to the Australian version. In the US, Bing ranked 17th among all websites out of over 450,000 websites, up from 5120 the week before the official launch when the website was merely a placeholder. Within the Search Engines category, Bing ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise and Bing Image Search ranked 15th for the week ending June 6, 2009.

Dot-com bubble

Main article: Dot-com bubble

Suddenly the low price of reaching millions worldwide, and the possibility of selling to or hearing from those people at the same moment when they were reached, promised to overturn established business dogma in advertising, mail-order sales, customer relationship management, and many more areas. The web was a new killer app—it could bring together unrelated buyers and sellers in seamless and low-cost ways. Visionaries around the world developed new business models, and ran to their nearest venture capitalist. While some of the new entrepreneurs had experience in business in economics, the majority were simply people with ideas, and didn't manage the capital influx prudently. Additionally, many dot-com business plans were predicated on the assumption that by using the Internet, they would bypass the distribution channels of existing businesses and therefore not have to compete with them; when the established businesses with strong existing brands developed their own Internet presence, these hopes were shattered, and the newcomers were left attempting to break into markets dominated by larger, more established businesses. Many did not have the ability to do so.

The dot-com bubble burst on March 10, 2000, when the technology heavy NASDAQ Composite index peaked at 5,048.62 (intra-day peak 5,132.52), more than double its value just a year before. By 2001, the bubble's deflation was running full speed. A majority of the dot-coms had ceased trading, after having burnt through their venture capital and IPO capital, often without ever making a profit.

Online population forecast

A study conducted by JupiterResearch anticipates that a 38 percent increase in the number of people with online access will mean that, by 2011, 22 percent of the Earth's population will surf the Internet regularly. The report says 1.1 billion people have regular Web access. For the study, JupiterResearch defined online users as people who regularly access the Internet from dedicated Internet-access devices, which exclude cellular telephones.>>next>>

Opening the network to commerce

The interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly debated topic. Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use could be unclear and subjective. UUCPNet and the X.25 IPSS had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNet connections. Some UUCP links still remained connecting to these networks however, as administrators cast a blind eye to their operation.

During the late 1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP) companies were formed. Companies like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal Software were formed to provide service to the regional research networks and provide alternate network access, UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public. The first commercial dialup ISP in the United States was The World, opened in 1989.

In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1862(g), permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. This caused controversy amongst university users, who were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks.^{[citation needed]} Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research.^{[citation needed]}

By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close. In 1994, the NSFNet, now renamed ANSNET (Advanced Networks and Services) and allowing non-profit corporations access, lost its standing as the backbone of the Internet. Both government institutions and competing commercial providers created their own backbones and interconnections. Regional network access points (NAPs) became the primary interconnections between the many networks. The final commercial restrictions ended in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone.

Internet Engineering Task Force

Requests for Comments (RFCs) started as memoranda addressing the various protocols that facilitate the functioning of the Internet and were previously edited by the late Dr. Postel as part of his IANA functions.

The IETF started in January 1985 as a quarterly meeting of U.S. government funded researchers. Representatives from non-government vendors were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting in October of that year.^{[citation needed]} In 1992, the Internet Society, a professional membership society, was formed and the IETF was transferred to operation under it as an independent international standards body.^{[citation needed]}

NIC, InterNIC, IANA and ICANN

The first central authority to coordinate the operation of the network was the Network Information Centre (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. In 1972, management of these issues was given to the newly created Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In addition to his role as the RFC Editor, Jon Postel worked as the manager of IANA until his death in 1998.

As the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file would be distributed from SRI International to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created by Paul Mockapetris. The Defense Data Network—Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including the top-level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us, root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract. In 1991, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the administration and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up until this point) to Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small private-sector Network Solutions, Inc.

Since at this point in history most of the growth on the Internet was coming from non-military sources, it was decided that the Department of Defense would no longer fund registration services outside of the .mil TLD. In 1993 the U.S. National Science Foundation, after a competitive bidding process in 1992, created the InterNIC to manage the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases, and awarded the contract to three organizations. Registration Services would be provided by Network Solutions; Directory and Database Services would be provided by AT&T; and Information Services would be provided by General Atomics.

In 1998 both IANA and InterNIC were reorganized under the control of ICANN, a California non-profit corporation contracted by the United States Department of Commerce to manage a number of Internet-related tasks. The role of operating the DNS system was privatized and opened up to competition, while the central management of name allocations would be awarded on a contract tender basis.

Globalization and 21st century

Main article: Internet governance

Since the 1990s, the Internet's governance and organization has been of global importance to commerce. The organizations which hold control of certain technical aspects of the Internet are both the successors of the old ARPANET oversight and the current decision-makers in the day-to-day technical aspects of the network. While formally recognized as the administrators of the network, their roles and their decisions are subject to international scrutiny and objections which limit them. These objections have led to the ICANN removing themselves from relationships with first the University of Southern California in 2000, and finally in September 2009, gaining autonomy from the US government by the ending of its longstanding agreements, although some contractual obligations with the Department of Commerce continue until at least 2011. The history of the Internet will now be played out in many ways as a consequence of the ICANN organization.

In the role of forming standard associated with the Internet, the IETF continues to serve as the ad-hoc standards group. They continue to issue Request for Comments numbered sequentially from RFC 1 under the ARPANET project, for example, and the IETF precursor was the GADS Task Force which was a group of US government-funded researchers in the 1980s. Many of the group's recent developments have been of global necessity, such as the i18n working groups who develop things like internationalized domain names. The Internet Society has helped to fund the IETF, providing limited oversight.

Use and culture

E-mail and Usenet

Main articles: e-mail, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and Usenet

E-mail is often called the killer application of the Internet. However, it actually predates the Internet and was a crucial tool in creating it. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is unclear, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address format, using the @ sign to separate user names from host names.

A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP. See the history of SMTP protocol.

In addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be read by many others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin board-like messages. This quickly grew into discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide range of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNet similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing both technical issues and more culturally focused topics (such as science fiction, discussed on the sflovers mailing list). >>next>>

TCP/IP becomes worldwide ( ISP 4)

CERN, the European Internet, the link to the Pacific and beyond

Between 1984 and 1988 CERN began installation and operation of TCP/IP to interconnect its major internal computer systems, workstations, PCs and an accelerator control system. CERN continued to operate a limited self-developed system CERNET internally and several incompatible (typically proprietary) network protocols externally. There was considerable resistance in Europe towards more widespread use of TCP/IP and the CERN TCP/IP intranets remained isolated from the Internet until 1989.

In 1988 Daniel Karrenberg, from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, visited Ben Segal, CERN's TCP/IP Coordinator, looking for advice about the transition of the European side of the UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over X.25 links) over to TCP/IP. In 1987, Ben Segal had met with Len Bosack from the then still small company Cisco about purchasing some TCP/IP routers for CERN, and was able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate hardware. This expanded the European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks, and in 1989 CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections. This coincided with the creation of Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), initially a group of IP network administrators who met regularly to carry out co-ordination work together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative in Amsterdam.

At the same time as the rise of internetworking in Europe, ad hoc networking to ARPA and in-between Australian universities formed, based on various technologies such as X.25 and UUCPNet. These were limited in their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making individual international UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989, Australian universities joined the push towards using IP protocols to unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee and provided a dedicated IP based network for Australia.

The Internet began to penetrate Asia in the late 1980s. Japan, which had built the UUCP-based network JUNET in 1984, connected to NSFNet in 1989. It hosted the annual meeting of the Internet Society, INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a global Internet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.

Digital divide

While developed countries with technological infrastructures were joining the Internet, developing countries began to experience a digital divide separating them from the Internet. On an essentially continental basis, they are building organizations for Internet resource administration and sharing operational experience, as more and more transmission facilities go into place.

Africa

At the beginning of the 1990s, African countries relied upon X.25 IPSS and 2400 baud modem UUCP links for international and internetwork computer communications.

In August, 1995, InfoMail Uganda, Ltd., a privately held firm in Kampala now known as InfoCom http://www.imul.com, and NSN Network Services of Avon, Colorado, sold in 1997 and now known as Clear Channel Satellite, established Africa's first native TCP/IP high-speed satellite Internet services. The data connection was originally carried by a C-Band RSCC Russian satellite which connected InfoMail's Kampala offices directly to NSN's MAE-West point of presence using a private network from NSN's leased ground station in New Jersey. InfoCom's first satellite connection was just 64kbps, serving a Sun host computer and twelve US Robotics dial-up modems.

In 1996 a USAID funded project, the Leland initiative, started work on developing full Internet connectivity for the continent. Guinea, Mozambique, Madagascar and Rwanda gained satellite earth stations in 1997, followed by Côte d'Ivoire and Benin in 1998.

Africa is building an Internet infrastructure. AfriNIC, headquartered in Mauritius, manages IP address allocation for the continent. As do the other Internet regions, there is an operational forum, the Internet Community of Operational Networking Specialists.

There are a wide range of programs both to provide high-performance transmission plant, and the western and southern coasts have undersea optical cable. High-speed cables join North Africa and the Horn of Africa to intercontinental cable systems. Undersea cable development is slower for East Africa; the original joint effort between New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy) has broken off and may become two efforts.

Asia and Oceania

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), headquartered in Australia, manages IP address allocation for the continent. APNIC sponsors an operational forum, the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).

In 1991, the People's Republic of China saw its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua University's TUNET. The PRC went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1994, between the Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center. However, China went on to implement its own digital divide by implementing a country-wide content filter.

Latin America

As with the other regions, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) manages the IP address space and other resources for its area. LACNIC, headquartered in Uruguay, operates DNS root, reverse DNS, and other key services.>>next>>

Merging the networks and creating the Internet (ISP 3)

TCP/IP

With so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them. Robert E. Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vinton Cerf of Stanford University to work with him on the problem. By 1973, they had soon worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmerman, Gerard LeLann and Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important work on this design. The specification of the resulting protocol, RFC 675 - Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, Network Working Group, December, 1974, contains the first attested use of the term internet, as a shorthand for internetworking; later RFCs repeat this use, so the word started out as an adjective rather than the noun it is today.

With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what their characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. DARPA agreed to fund development of prototype software, and after several years of work, the first somewhat crude demonstration of a gateway between the Packet Radio network in the SF Bay area and the ARPANET was conducted. On November 22, 1977 a three network demonstration was conducted including the ARPANET, the Packet Radio Network and the Atlantic Packet Satellite network—all sponsored by DARPA. Stemming from the first specifications of TCP in 1974, TCP/IP emerged in mid-late 1978 in nearly final form. By 1981, the associated standards were published as RFCs 791, 792 and 793 and adopted for use. DARPA sponsored or encouraged the development of TCP/IP implementations for many operating systems and then scheduled a migration of all hosts on all of its packet networks to TCP/IP. On January 1, 1983, TCP/IP protocols became the only approved protocol on the ARPANET, replacing the earlier NCP protocol.

ARPANET to several federal wide area networks: MILNET, NSI, and NSFNet

After the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA looked for another agency to hand off the network to; ARPA's primary mission was funding cutting edge research and development, not running a communications utility. Eventually, in July 1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense. In 1983, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANET was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET. MILNET subsequently became the unclassified but military-only NIPRNET, in parallel with the SECRET-level SIPRNET and JWICS for TOP SECRET and above. NIPRNET does have controlled security gateways to the public Internet.

The networks based on the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.

Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP. NASA developed the NASA Science Network, NSF developed CSNET and DOE evolved the Energy Sciences Network or ESNet.

In 1984 NSF developed CSNET exclusively based on TCP/IP. CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but it also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.

Transition towards the Internet

The term "internet" was adopted in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol (RFC 675: Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974) as an abbreviation of the term internetworking and the two terms were used interchangeably. In general, an internet was any network using TCP/IP. It was around the time when ARPANET was interlinked with NSFNet in the late 1980s, that the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being a large and global TCP/IP network.

As interest in wide spread networking grew and new applications for it were developed, the Internet's technologies spread throughout the rest of the world. The network-agnostic approach in TCP/IP meant that it was easy to use any existing network infrastructure, such as the IPSS X.25 network, to carry Internet traffic. In 1984, University College London replaced its transatlantic satellite links with TCP/IP over IPSS.

Many sites unable to link directly to the Internet started to create simple gateways to allow transfer of e-mail, at that time the most important application. Sites which only had intermittent connections used UUCP or FidoNet and relied on the gateways between these networks and the Internet. Some gateway services went beyond simple e-mail peering, such as allowing access to FTP sites via UUCP or e-mail.

Finally, the Internet's remaining centralized routing aspects were removed. The EGP routing protocol was replaced by a new protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), in order to allow the removal of the NSFNet Internet backbone network. In 1994, Classless Inter-Domain Routing was introduced to support better conservation of address space which allowed use of route aggregation to decrease the size of routing tables. The picture on the right hand side shows a system made with the help of the high-tech company BBN. >>next>>

Networks that led to the Internet ( ISP 2 )

ARPANET

Promoted to the head of the information processing office at DARPA, Robert Taylor intended to realize Licklider's ideas of an interconnected networking system. Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT, he initiated a project to build such a network. The first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Building on ideas developed in ALOHAnet, the ARPANET grew rapidly. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days.


ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker from the University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.

International collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For various political reasons, European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks. Notable exceptions were the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) in 1972, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to the Tanum Earth Station and Peter Kirstein's research group in the UK, initially at the Institute of Computer Science, London University and later at University College London.

X.25 and public access

Based on ARPA's research, packet switching network standards were developed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the form of X.25 and related standards. While using packet switching, X.25 is built on the concept of virtual circuits emulating traditional telephone connections. In 1974, X.25 formed the basis for the SERCnet network between British academic and research sites, which later became JANET. The initial ITU Standard on X.25 was approved in March 1976.

The British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create the first international packet switched network, referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in 1978. This network grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981. By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.

Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was commonly available for business use. Telenet offered its Telemail electronic mail service, which was also targeted to enterprise use rather than the general email system of the ARPANET.

The first public dial-in networks used asynchronous TTY terminal protocols to reach a concentrator operated in the public network. Some networks, such as CompuServe, used X.25 to multiplex the terminal sessions into their packet-switched backbones, while others, such as Tymnet, used proprietary protocols. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first to offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. Other major dial-in networks were America Online (AOL) and Prodigy that also provided communications, content, and entertainment features. Many bulletin board system (BBS) networks also provided on-line access, such as FidoNet which was popular amongst hobbyist computer users, many of them hackers and amateur radio operators.

UUCP

In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using simple Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line with nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following public release of the software, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and links between FidoNet and dial-up BBS hosts. UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections, and the lack of strict use policies (commercial organizations who might provide bug fixes) compared to later networks like CSnet and Bitnet. All connects were local. By 1981 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in 1984. - Sublink Network, operating since 1987 and officially founded in Italy in 1989, based its interconnectivity upon UUCP to redistribute mail and news groups messages throughout its Italian nodes (about 100 at the time) owned both by private individuals and small companies. Sublink Network represented possibly one of the first examples of the internet technology becoming progress through popular diffusion.

NPL

In 1965, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) proposed a national data network based on packet-switching. The proposal was not taken up nationally but by 1970 he had designed and built a packet-switched network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions.

By 1976 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986.

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History of the Internet ( ISP )

Before the wide spread of internetworking (802.1) that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications within the stations on the local network and the prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe computer model. Several research programs began to explore and articulate principles of networking between physically separate networks, leading to the development of the packet switching model of digital networking. These research efforts included those of the laboratories of Vinton G. Cerf at Stanford University, Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock at MIT and at UCLA. The research led to the development of several packet-switched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET, Telenet, and the X.25 protocols. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for internetworking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet Protocol Suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of internetworking began to form into the idea of a global network that would be called the Internet, based on standardized protocols officially implemented in 1982. Adoption and interconnection occurred quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to penetrate into the rest of the world as it became the de-facto international standard for the global network. However, the disparity of growth between advanced nations and the third-world countries led to a digital divide that is still a concern today.

Following commercialization and introduction of privately run Internet service providers in the 1980s, and the Internet's expansion for popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce. This includes the rise of near instant communication by electronic mail (e-mail), text based discussion forums, and the World Wide Web. Investor speculation in new markets provided by these innovations would also lead to the inflation and subsequent collapse of the Dot-com bubble. But despite this, the Internet continues to grow, driven by commerce, greater amounts of online information and knowledge and social networking known as Web 2.0.

Three terminals and an ARPA

In the 1950s and early 1960s, before the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited in that they only allowed communications between the stations on the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers in Sullivan, Illinois, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.

A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J.C.R. Licklider, articulated the ideas in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis.

"A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions."

—J.C.R. Licklider,

In August, 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man Computer Communication", one of the first descriptions of a networked future.

In October, 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as Director of the newly established IPTO within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Licklider's identified need for inter-networking would be made obvious by the apparent waste of resources this caused.

"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. [...]

I said, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet."

—Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York Times,

Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus that led his successors such as Lawrence Roberts and Robert Taylor to further the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.

Packet switching

At the tip of the internetworking problem lay the issue of connecting separate physical networks to form one logical network. During the 1960s, Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), produced a study of surviveable networks for the US military. Information transmitted across Baran's network would be divided into what he called 'message-blocks'. Independently, Donald Davies (National Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed and developed a similar network based on what he called packet-switching, the term that would ultimately be adopted. Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed mathematical theory behind this technology. Packet-switching provides better bandwidth utilization and response times than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony, particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.


Packet switching is a rapid store-and-forward networking design that divides messages up into arbitrary packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. Early networks used message switched systems that required rigid routing structures prone to single point of failure. This led Tommy Krash and Paul Baran's US Military funded research to focus on using message-blocks to include network redundancy, which in turn led to the widespread urban legend that the Internet was designed to resist nuclear attack.

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