UPDATE:Â I believe either Vint Cerf himself or more likely a Google India representative posted a comment with some updated stats. I double checked the stats and indeed found them out to be right as shown in the presentation. I am updating the post to reflect the correct stats.Â
So, I finally make my way into the Google Speaker series where the guest speaker was Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Dr.Vinton Cerf who is also the current Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The whole show was extremely well organized. Dr. Cerf promptly showed up at the assigned time at 5:30 pm IST. There was a formal introduction of Dr.Cerf, his contributions, his various achievements by the Google India representatives before handing the stage over to him.
He starts of by introducing himself and then praising the cofounder of TCP/IP Bob Kahn and then talks briefly about SETI and the role which collective computing is playing these days in crunching the world’s problems. About SETI he jokes ” Maybe the reason we are searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is that we didn’t find any here on Earth”
His formal presentation began with him talking about some stats. He tells us that there are almost 500-600 million servers on this planet and that the number of Internet users has jumped from 50 million in 1997 to over a Billion in 2006 where Asia with 56% of the world’s total population brings in almost 389.4 Million Internet users with a total penetration of 16.6%. He then talks with dismay about how there are a Billion people in Africa and yet there are only 32.8 Million users in the entire continent.
Mobile Devices: Then he talks about mobile devices where he lets us know that there are almost 2.5 Billion mobile users which far exceed the number of laptops or desktops or servers out there. He then talks about the benefits of a mobile phone which is smaller, has a smaller keyboard and a smaller screen size all of which present their own unique challenges in delivering content and applications to such a mobile platform.
Current technology shaping the Internet — BroadBand
Vint Cerf then makes an interesting observation where he says that we are not sending as much as we are downloading which the basis of today’s internet. He lets us know that he a very strong proponent of symmetric broadband.
“Half of the traffic is Bit Torrent, and a lot of that may be video. It’s symmetric. As a user downloads a piece of a file, that piece is made available to others. The effect is that a user is pushing as much traffic as they pull. This does a funny thing to companies that offer ‘broadband service.’ Cable modems are asymmetric. DSL is the same. Symmetric service is competing with higher priced DS-3 and T-1 service. There’s a built in disincentive to create symmetric services, but as fiber capacities reach residential users, we will all want to push as much information as we pull. I’m not talking about people doing anything illegal. There’s a pressure from the edge for symmetry in the internet.”
Current Research problems being faced by Google
He then talks about the problems being faced by Google and the opportunities for everyone out there to come up with a solution by including the following as their dissertation topics…
a. Internet is not secure
b. Internet “Erlang” formulas
c. QOS debates(smart routers?) — debating whether the cost of charging for services and examining traffic would be more expensive than simply building more bandwidth.
d. Mobility, persistence(processes, convertions)
e. Multi homing — Multi-homing can be very effective for ensuring continuous connectivity — eliminating the ISP as a single point of failure — and it can be cost effective as well. However, your multi-homing strategy must be carefully planned to ensure that you actually improve connectivity for your company
f. Multipath routing — the concept of providing multipath routing at the naming level and supporting replicated sites. Also getting people thinking about multi-path routing algorithms should provide a good “safety valve”, just in case there should ever be valid military reasons for separating the Internet.
Vint Cerf adds in the comments
“Multipath routing actually is intended to increase the capacity between a pair of endpoints on the Internet,if there are in fact independent paths that could concurrently carry traffic between them”
g. Broadcast utilization
h. Mesh and Sensor networks
i. Scaling(of events) – IPVL — On scaling, IPv6 is intended to deal with increasing number of endpoints on the internet, not so much scaling of events
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Okay, this is one of those situations where I think I am at the right place at the right time. I am currently in India right now and from one of my buddies who works in Google, India, I came to know of this Speaker series by Dr. Vinton Cerf, one of the “fathers of Internet” along with Bob Kahn.
Google 
