FAIRFAX, Va.-One must first define the world before predictions can be made about how soon the world will be connected to the Internet, said an expert at last week’s 2001 Global Internet Summit.
“It depends on what you mean by the world. … We have Internet presence in almost every country of the world, but the presence varies widely,” said Vint Cerf, senior vice president of WorldCom Inc., explaining the discrepancy between his prediction that half of the world will be connected by 2010 and Alex Mandl’s forecast that the entire world will be connected in five to eight years.
Cerf, who is considered “the father of the Internet,” and Mandl, chairman and chief executive officer of Teligent Inc., participated on a panel entitled “The Global Technical Infrastructure.”
The moderator of the panel, Dr. Ed Bersoff, president and chief executive officer of BTG Inc., said Cerf’s prediction was based on the telephony model.
“It seems like we can predict how fast half of the world will be connected, but the other half will be forever,” said Bersoff.
Cerf didn’t agree, commenting that the Internet “will penetrate more deeply than the telephone because [more] devices will be Internet-enabled.” He added a prediction by L.M. Ericsson that there will 1.5 billion Internet-enabled mobile devices by 2006.
The predictions were an attempt to answer the panel’s main focus question of how long it will take for the world to be connected to the Internet in five seconds or less. Mandl expounded on the question by saying the Internet will need to become an essential element to one’s life on a global scale before the world is globally connected.
“An essential tool means that it becomes a critical part of your life and it is hard to imagine your life without it, said Mandl.
Because large segments of the world do not yet consider the Internet critical, “the notion of a global Internet … is a bit unrealistic,” Mandl added.
Broadband technology is expected to speed the Internet’s advancement to being an essential element in one’s life, said the panelists. This is going slow, Mandl said, noting that a “high percentage of the world still connects to the Internet through dial-up mode, still in narrowband mode.”
Finding a cost-effective means to connect the world is one reason why it may take so long to connect the world, Mandl said. This despite the fact that fixed wireless, the technology deployed by Teligent, is cheaper, according to Mandl, than fiber.
As more people use Internet technology, more people and governments will have to accept the issues of security and privacy, said Dr. Taher Elgamal, Ph.D., president and CEO of Securify Inc.
“Bringing broadband into the home is actually going to be a major security issue because people are not aware of the security risks,” said Elgamal.
But there is no easy answer to how you protect privacy while maintaining absolute security, said Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah).
“The Internet was devised to give everybody access to everybody. That in and of itself would mean that there will be no security. … There is no silver bullet. … If you get absolute privacy, you are never going to buy anything off the Internet again. You are never going to look at anything on the Internet again. … There is no 30-second answer. There is no 30-minute answer,” said Bennett.
Another conundrum in the debate is whether privacy can be protected while government tries to protect the public and national security.
“Privacy is all wrapped up in freedom,” said Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R-Va.), who co-chaired the conference with John T. Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco Systems Inc.
The FBI, on the other hand, does not believe there is a conflict because it believes it always stays within the framework of the Constitution, said Leslie Weiser Jr., chief of outreach for the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center.
