by Gerald Boerner
We start examining how the ARPANet was expanded to the Internet for Universities to an Internet that is available to end users. In a word, this process is related to a national infrastructure, more properly called a “Backbone.” This expansion started when the National Science Foundation charged Dr. David P. Mills to develop the NSFNet to connect universities across the country. This represented an expansion beyond those elite research universities with ARPA grants.
Initially, Mills established a 56 Kbit backbone, which was soon expanded to a 1.5 Mbit network. This backbone required the expansion of router programming and then the establishment of points of presence of access points to this backbone via special Internet Service Providers. These include companies like Earthlink. This role has been assumed by either cable providers (via Cable Modems) or telcos (via DSL). GLB
“The story of the Internet is this incredibly strong, exciting change.”
— James Daly
“Russia should support globalization. The Internet can develop in Russia in a very speedy way.”
— Anatoly Chubais
“Internet penetration in Italy is quite low and the Berlusconi media machine controls most of what people see.”
— Joichi Ito
“We were the first urban school system in the country to wire all of our schools for the Internet.”
— Thomas Menino
“I left General Magic in 1996 to become an Internet hobbyist – got a T-1 line to my house. At one point I had all four food banks of the Bay Area hosted from this house here.”
— Andy Hertzfeld
“With the Internet, kids today learn things quicker than we do and they have everything there is to see, so you have to do more than just remake some old ’70s film.”
— Donnie Wahlberg
“A short exposure to the convention convinced me that the Internet may save the Democracy in that it is a way for the people, for the citizens, to have some direct influence on the government.”
— John Jay Hooker
“Internet journalism is not a world we know very well at all. It’s conducted more on the screen and less in bars, which makes it rather less useful for getting stories about people throwing up over one another, which is what one’s after.”
— Ian Hislop
Wizards of the Internet: David L. Mills & ISPs
Note: Today we will look at several related topics that enabled the Internet to expand across the country. We will first look at Dr. David L. Mills who developed the NSFNet that connected universities across the country. We will then look at the Internet Backbone that made this interconnection possible. Finally, we will look at the role of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that extended access points to smaller educational institutions and individual users.
David L. Mills
David L. Mills (Born: 1938) is an American computer engineer. Mills was the chairman of the GADS Task Force and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force. He invented the Network Time Protocol, the fuzzball router, the Exterior Gateway Protocol, inspired the author of ping, and had the first FTP implementation. He has also authored numerous RFCs. In 1999 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2002, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In 2008, Mills was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
He has participated since 1977 in Internet technology development and protocol engineering and continue in retirement with occasional funded research projects. His research interests include computer internetworking systems, security architectures and cryptographic protocols. Current and past projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), US Navy, US Army and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He teaches graduate courses in computer networks, computer security and the mathematics of cryptography. He also teaches undergraduate courses in computer architecture, electronic circuit analysis and analog/digital communications.
Internet Backbone
Each line is drawn between two
nodes, representing two IP addresses.
This is a small look at the backbone
of the Internet.
The Internet backbone refers to the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected networks and core routers in the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers, the Internet exchange points and Network access points, that interchange Internet traffic between the countries, continents and across the oceans of the world. Traffic interchange between the Internet service providers (ISPs), often Tier 1 networks, participating in the Internet backbone exchange traffic by privately negotiated interconnection agreements, primarily governed by the principle of settlement-free peering.
A backbone network or network backbone is a part of computer network infrastructure that interconnects various pieces of network, providing a path for the exchange of information between different LANs or subnetworks. A backbone can tie together diverse networks in the same building, in different buildings in a campus environment, or over wide areas. Normally, the backbone’s capacity is greater than the networks connected to it.
A large corporation that has many locations may have a backbone network that ties all of the locations together, for example, if a server cluster needs to be accessed by different departments of a company that are located at different geographical locations. The pieces of the network connections (for example: ethernet, wireless) that bring these departments together is often mentioned as network backbone. Network congestion is often taken into consideration while designing backbones.
Backbone networks should not be confused with the Internet backbone.
Architectural principles
The Internet and consequently its backbone networks do not rely on central control or coordinating facilities, nor do they implement any global network policies. The resilience of the Internet results from its principal architectural features, most notably the idea of placing as little as possible network state and control functions in the network elements, but instead relying on the endpoints of communication to handle most of the processing to ensure data integrity, reliability, and authentication. In addition, the high degree of redundancy of today’s network links and sophisticated real-time routing protocols provide alternate paths of communications for load balancing and congestion avoidance.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
An Internet service provider (ISP), also sometimes referred to as an Internet access provider (IAP), is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet. The ISP connects to its customers using a data transmission technology appropriate for delivering Internet Protocol datagrams, such as dial-up, DSL, cable modem, wireless or dedicated high-speed interconnects.
ISPs may provide Internet e-mail accounts to users which allow them to communicate with one another by sending and receiving electronic messages through their ISP’s servers. (As part of their e-mail service, ISPs usually offer the user an e-mail client software package, developed either internally or through an outside contract arrangement.) ISPs may provide other services such as remotely storing data files on behalf of their customers, as well as other services unique to each particular ISP.
End-user-to-ISP connection
ISPs employ a range of technologies to enable consumers to connect to their network.
For users and small businesses… The most popular options include dial-up, DSL (typically Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, ADSL), broadband wireless, cable modem, fiber to the premises (FTTH), and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) (typically basic rate interface).
For customers with more demanding requirements… This includes organizations such as medium-to-large businesses, or other ISPs, DSL (often SHDSL or ADSL), Ethernet, Metro Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, Frame Relay, ISDN (BRI or PRI), ATM, satellite Internet access and synchronous optical networking (SONET) are more likely to be used.
Locality
When using a dial-up or ISDN connection method, the ISP cannot determine the caller’s physical location to more detail than using the number transmitted using an appropriate form of Caller ID; it is entirely possible to e.g. connect to an ISP located in Mexico from the USA. Other means of connection such as cable or DSL require a fixed registered connection node, usually associated at the ISP with a physical address.
ISP Interconnection
Just as their customers pay them for Internet access, ISPs themselves pay upstream ISPs for Internet access. An upstream ISP usually has a larger network than the contracting ISP and/or is able to provide the contracting ISP with access to parts of the Internet the contracting ISP by itself has no access to.
In the simplest case, a single connection is established to an upstream ISP and is used to transmit data to or from areas of the Internet beyond the home network; this mode of interconnection is often cascaded multiple times until reaching a Tier 1 carrier. In reality, the situation is often more complex. ISPs with more than one point of presence (PoP) may have separate connections to an upstream ISP at multiple PoPs, or they may be customers of multiple upstream ISPs and may have connections to each one of them at one or more point of presence.
References:
Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: ARPANet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet
Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet
Wikipedia: David L. Mills…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills
Wikipedia: Internet Backbone…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone
Wikipedia: Internet Service Provider…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Service_Provider
Web Sites and Blogs:
Mills’ Web Site: David L. Mills, PhD…
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/
Brainy Quote: Internet Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/internet_10.html
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