Network Connection

By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Director of  Academic Computing and User Services

Stop the Presses - It's a new Internet (Again)

I've just seen notice that the Lockheed corporation along with Microsoft and others have been contracted by the U.S. Government to reinvent the Internet for military purposes. Lockheed has been awarded a $31M contract by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. $31M won't buy you more than one fifth of an F22 Raptor, but with that and the help from some friends they'll remake Internet technology.  Lockheed says that they will "develop router technologies that include strong authentication and self configuration capabilities to improve security, reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management."

If the idea of a defense research agency contracting with a commercial company to guide the development of a more robust network seems oddly familiar, it may be because it's happened before. In 1968, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the "Defense" was prepended later) issued a request for bids on a project to develop data networking technology. To put things in extreme summary mode, the contract was awarded to a company named BBN, a small group of smart people got together to design a network, the ARPANet was born in 1969, and now 40 years later we have YouTube (happy 40th birthday to the Internet this coming November 21? -- More about this in next month's Network Connection.)

Reinventing the Internet?

If the idea of reinventing the Internet seems familiar, it may be because it's happened before. The ARPA Internet was mostly used to connect computers at research sites, but was useful for a lot of other things.  Next came NSFNet which was an expansion of the fledgeling ARPA Internet and while mostly used to connect supercomputer sites across the U.S., was useful for a lot of other other things.  Once the NSFNet was well developed and linking a lot of research and education sites, much of its infrastructure was adopted by commercial telecommunications carriers and the commercial Internet was born with governance that was more independent of the U.S. Government.

Attempts to reinvent the Internet didn't stop there, however. Internet2 sought to expand the capacity available to Universities and research institutions and promised to foster a slew of innovations similar to the activity seen around the ARPA Internet and NFSNet. Internet2 is still around, but it's accomplishments don't nearly rival what's been developed around the commercial Internet, like Google, and YouTube, and Facebook, and Twitter, and all of the other information and communication sources that are becoming ubiquitous in our lives (and on our phones.) 

Apparently Internet2 still didn't provide enough bandwidth capacity for some research, or it could have been that telecommunications companies had a bunch of fiber optic cable capacity left over from the "dot-com bubble" burst, and so the National Lambda Rail (NLR) was born as another research network, with an emphasis on increasing Internet "speed" and fostering network research. While the NLR has yet to provide the next breakthrough in networking technology, it has motivated the State of Texas to fund network connections that link "public and private institutions of higher education, community colleges, and K-12 public schools" in the form of the Lonestar Research and Education Network (LEARN). Similar developments have happened in other states and regions.

A whole new meaning to "Internet Exploder" ... 

So, here comes Lockheed to reinvent the Internet and in partnership with the U.S. Military and Microsoft, it could bring a whole new meaning to "Internet Exploder."  But, Lockheed's stated goals of increased security and simpler management are certainly laudable. It seems, however, that those problems may have already been addressed by the IPv6 protocol that was developed to replace the original set of standards (IPv4) used to organize and route Internet traffic.  IPv6 expands the available numeric address space for the Internet, but also addresses issues of security and management (I think someone owes me $31M.) Even with the many improvements that IPv6 would bring, its general adoption has been slowed by the inertia found in a successful marketplace.  Routers, software, computers, and operating systems might support IPv6, but they all definitely support IPv4, so there has yet to be a compelling reason for IPv6 adoption by the commercial Internet, or even most of the networks like UNT's connected to the commercial Internet.

Lockheed is welcome to attempt to reinvent the Internet, but at best what they could come up with is some technology dedicate for Military use, but not necessarily influential on the Internet that the rest of us know and use.  If you need proof, just think about the last time that you wrote a program in Ada. To be fair to Lockheed, it wasn't their claim to be reinventing the Internet. That hyperbole is best left to technology writers trying to convince us that Lockheed's $31M defense contract is news, particularly in light of the $65 Billion or so that U.S. tax payers have spent on F-22 Raptors. It seems that you can't reinvent the Internet no matter how hard you try, but as we've seen over the years, the Internet is good at reinventing itself.