Some of them are short-term, having to do with the support of telephony, video, and other real-time services, but the most intriguing notion is to start work on an interplanetary Internet protocol. It sometimes takes 10 to 15 years before these things can materialize and become production capabilities. It is my guess that in 20 years time we actually will want to interact with people and systems on the moon, Mars, and possibly the other planets. It is time to get busy getting the protocol suite developed so we can do that. Right now, we can't.

"In 20 years we will want to interact with people and systems on the moon, Mars, and possibly the other planets. It is time to get busy getting the protocol suite developed so we can do that."

SCHINDLER: What do Internet service providers need to do to take the Internet to the next level?
CERF: The most vital thing we can do collectively, apart from just making sure we have enough capacity, is to begin to work towards higher and higher reliability for the services of the network.

We can tell already, even though in the states it is only about 20 percent penetrated into the business and residential sector, that people are really beginning to rely on the availability of Internet on a day to day basis. As they begin to rely on this system, they are going to be increasingly damaged when it isn't available. Business doesn't work, you can't reach your friends, you miss an important announcement or piece of correspondence.

We can't let that happen. We need to build into the Internet community the same respect for quality, reliability, and resilience that has gone into the telephone system over the last 100 years. But we need to do it in a lot less time that that.

There are already cooperating activities. One is the Internet Service Providers Organization, a collection of the larger ISPs, working together to insure that we have good operational procedures to resolve problems and solve them quickly, so our customers will benefit. That is the most important thing we can do.

"As [users] begin to rely on this system, they are going to be increasingly damaged when it isn't available."

The next most important thing is to get security into the system more thoroughly than we have up until the present. That means not only building security into the network itself to protect it, but also to provide facilities for end-to-end security, so our customers can feel secure they have confidential communications, as opposed to communications that might be more open than they would like.

SCHINDLER: Do you remember your first computer?
CERF: The very first machine I ever did anything with was a Bendix G-15 computer. It used punched paper tape as its input/output, and a very basic programming language. I graduated to more elaborate machines over time, back in 1960.

SCHINDLER: My first machine was a Monrobot Mark 11. You were never on that one, were you?
CERF: No, I'm afraid not. The other machines I worked on were mostly IBM equipment in the early stages. 7044 machines. Some 360s, some 360/90s. Then later some smaller machines, PDP-11s and VAXes. Ultimately, things like Apple. I am a Mac freak.

Paul Schindler: Do you remember the first time you got on the Internet? Vint Cerf: That is an interesting question, having built the thing with Bob Kahn.

SCHINDLER: Certainly a Mac is easier to operate than a 32-bit 1024-location rotating drum computer like the Monrobot. I had to divide my programs in four, so the instruction would be under the read head just when the machine was ready for it.
CERF: This is so you could pick up, as the rotating drum came around, the next instruction just as the drum came under the read head.

SCHINDLER: I usually just missed, so I would massively de-optimize my programs instead of optimizing them.
CERF: That's usually referred to as pessimize the program.

SCHINDLER: Do you remember the first time you got on the Internet?
CERF: That is an interesting question, having built the thing with Bob Kahn. The first time we really had a three-network system running was in November 1977. Before that we had done some two-network demonstrations of a packet radio net and the ARPAnet, the original wide-area packet-switched network that ARPA developed; those tests would have taken place in 1975. The answer is the mid-1970s.

"I think we had very high hopes for the technology, but I don't think we appreciated what would happen as it penetrated into daily use by the general population."

SCHINDLER: Did you see the future from moment one? Did you know the Internet would be this big?
CERF: I don't think any of us quite had the magnitude of the Internet in mind at the time. We were terribly excited about the idea of helping computers in multiple networks to interact with each other, and to design it in such a way that any new telecommunications technologies that came along would in fact, be able to support the Internet. That was part of our design objective and I am very happy to say that we met that one.

I think we had very high hopes for the technology, but I don't think we appreciated what would happen as it penetrated into daily use by the general population.

PAUL SCHINDLER: It has been suggested that infrastructure investments aren't sufficient. Is that a fair criticism?
VINT CERF: I don't think so. This is such a large and complex system, you can find lots of places where that observation would indeed hold true. At MCI we have been making enormous strides in increasing total capacity on our backbone. Our objective is to never be the bottleneck. In order to achieve that, we have been increasing the speeds of the backbone links by leaps and bounds. At the beginning of 1997, for example, we completed a 622-megabit backbone system. We just doubled that, so we are running on all the links at twice that bandwidth. In the future, we are already testing 40-gigabit lines on our optical network.

"At the beginning of 1997, for example, we completed a 622-megabit backbone system. We just doubled that, so we are running on all the links at twice that bandwidth."

The real issue for me is whether or not the vendors of the switching equipment will be able to keep up with the speeds we know we can drive the optical circuits.

This is a self-healing problem. The Internet service providers who are unable to make the investment to increase capacity will eventually exhibit poor quality service, and customers will go elsewhere. So long as some people are making the investment, they will garner more and more of the traffic. The system will continue to grow, because revenues will be falling to the places that offer the best service.

SCHINDLER: A number of solutions have been proposed. You mentioned a 40-gigabyte backbone.
CERF: Gigabits, actually, but what's a factor of eight among friends. ... And besides, in the lab they have demonstrated terabit fibers, that's trillions of bits per second. That's not in production anywhere, but it is well within the range of feasibility for a single-mode optical fiber to do this. I'm anticipating that we will have plenty of fiber capacity as time goes on.

SCHINDLER: Plenty of bits on the backbone, but a small pipe to the household. Which solution do you favor for that last mile?
CERF: It depends on where you are in the country. The cable modems which have been demonstrated work quite well, but they work best when the cable system has a hybrid fiber/coax network to support it. Not all cable companies are prepared to make an investment in hybrid fiber/coax, and as a result, they may not be able to support that solution.

The telcos, working with our old friend twisted-pair copper have demonstrated up to 52 megabits on relatively short hops, down to, let's say, a megabit or 1.5 megabits as far as 18,000 feet, which covers 95 percent of all homes on twisted pair.

I have left out things like point-to-point radio links, which also might be a solution to the problem.

There is even something quite exotic. Power companies may decide they want to have the ability to control appliances on an appliance-by-appliance basis, because they will save money, not having to build excess power generation, if they can control the appliances that are the most energy consuming during periods of peak load. If you could save several billion dollars by not having to build a power-generation plant, you might spend some of that money on optical fiber to go to someone's house, then turn around and resell the capacity, which you didn't need to control an appliance -- and you only need a few bits per second for that.

We could have some surprising solutions become available that might not have been anticipated.

"Wouldn't it be nice to have a VCR on the Net, pull up a Web page, click on the programs you want, and have the net deliver the instructions to do the recording to the VCR."

SCHINDLER: Toasters on the Internet were not just jokes?
CERF: Indeed. I have already spoken to a gentleman who is in the process of building TCP/IP on a chip. One expects those devices to be so cheap, in quantity, that you'd put them in all kinds of appliances. Water heaters, VCRs, for example. Wouldn't it be nice to have a VCR on the Net, pull up a Web page, click on the programs you want, and have the net deliver the instructions to do the recording to the VCR. For that matter, deliver the time of day as well, so you don't have to do anything about that flashing "12:00" that drives everyone crazy after a power outage. There are lots of reasons appliances might be put up on the net, not just for power control.

SCHINDLER: Do you envision a time when there will be a priority packet service available? When you can pay for better response?
CERF: There are a number of efforts afoot to create premium or priority services that distinguish the run-of-the-mill best efforts traffic -- the kind of Internet service you get today -- from services where some packets do get priority over others. That can be very important for an interactive application such as game playing, or even voice, where even modest delays can be quite disturbing to the participants. That is all quite doable. We are seeing changes in the router software already to offer that kind of differentiated service.

The more responsive services might assure bandwidth, which is another area where you might need premium service, in order to make large file transfers in a short amount of time. All of those services consume more resources than best efforts, so it is quite reasonable to assume that they might cost more. You wouldn't need them all the time; you'd only need them for certain applications for a period of time.