Internet Infrastructure - Infrastructure Adequacy

INFRASTRUCTURE ADEQUACY

By the early 2000s, the size of and traffic on the Internet had grown significantly. Research from Telcordia revealed that the number of Internet hosts, which includes things like routers, mail servers, workstations, and Web servers, increased 45 percent during 2000, reaching 100 million. At that time, the global population of Internet users was estimated to be 350 million. Furthermore, the kinds of services, including e-commerce, being performed on the Internet were growing in sophistication and complexity. Corresponding to this were increasing demands in the areas of network quality and performance.

Concerns existed regarding the ability of the Internet, and the communication protocols it relied on, to support the world's users. This was complicated by the Internet's large size and the fact that no one entity controlled it. Therefore, the quality, integrity, and performance of different areas of the network varied, and control was distributed to many different entities throughout the world.

One infrastructure concern that existed in the early 2000s concerned the ability of routers to handle the skyrocketing number of entries to the Internet backbone's routing table, which stores information about all of the existing network destinations on the Internet. According to Network World, this was leading to instability in the Internet's backbone routing infrastructure. Part of the problem involved large companies that engaged in multi-homing, a practice of connecting to two ISPs at once in case service with one failed. Although this helped to ensure a more consistent Internet connection (which is critical for e-commerce companies), the practice required a separate listing in the routing table for each ISP used.

Another concern involved the burgeoning number of international users in developing nations without the sophisticated infrastructure found in Europe and the United States. In March of 2001, Information-Week reported that although 100 million computers were connected to the Internet, that figure represented less than two percent of the world's population. It also explained that 88 percent of Internet users lived in industrialized nations.

This placed increased demands on limited resources in developing nations. Telecordia's research found that while the ratio of Internet users to hosts was 2.4 to one in the United States, the number was as high as 100 to one in countries like India where, according to eMarketer, less than one percent of the adult population has Internet access. In India, 2.2 phone lines exist per 100 people, and many of those are substandard for connecting to the Internet at appropriate speeds. Inadequate infrastructures in areas like India and Latin America have strong implications for e-commerce. Forrester Research predicted that by 2004, 85 percent of online trade will occur in only 12 countries, led by the United States and Western Europe. Although wireless and satellite connections were one solution for nations where ground-based network infrastructures were virtually non-existent, the Internet's TCP/IP protocol didn't work consistently well via satellite, requiring special software to remedy the problem.