What does half a decade amount to on the Net? A lot. Just five years ago, David Filo and Jerry Yang began the Yahoo list, Microsoft registered the domain name MSN.com, and Netscape released Navigator 1.0. Today there are more dot coms than one-armed bandits in Vegas, and 150 million to 200 million people are online. What a difference the Web makes.
So how will the Internet look in five more years? For starters, the Web will be bigger, flashier and noisier.
Everybody in the pool
As sure as bugs in a Windows program, more users will be on the Internet five years from now. According to New York-based international research firm Jupiter Communications, only 37 per cent of US households were connected to the Net in 1998; by 2003 this figure will have risen to 63 per cent - and that's a conservative estimate.
Despite the current wave of interest in broadband connections (through DSL, cable, or satellite modems), Jupiter Communications analyst Zia Daniell Wigder says less than 25 per cent of future Internet users will connect to the Net that way, and widespread broadband use will take longer to achieve than most people expect. Analog dial-up connections will be free for the asking, Wigder says, and broadband companies will have to sell consumers on paying for a superfast Net connection.
Will the Web backbone snap under all that weight? Some industry observers warn that the Net could get bogged down as video, audio and other rich media become more popular. To keep up, we may need "a 100 to 1000-fold improvement in the backbone, and each server may need to be 100 to 1000 times faster," says Abdelsalam Heddaya, vice president of research and architecture at US-based Infolibria.
The Internet, part two
Of course, there's a big difference between having enough bandwidth available for the entire Internet and having it available to you when you need it. As the Internet has become increasingly commercial and crowded, its original users - academics and researchers - have had a harder time accessing the communication lines. To mitigate this problem, developers of a new project called Internet2 have set aside miles of fibre-optic cable to devote to researchers' use and to serve as a testbed for future Internet applications and technologies. The project's participants, which include Nortel, Qwest, and Cisco, expect technologies developed and refined there to facilitate searches on the Internet, improve the reliability of streaming data (video, audio and the like), and generally create a more stable Net.
Until now, the biggest obstacle to delivering high-quality multimedia over the Internet has been the straw-sized connections that funnel data through it. But even the narrowest consumer broadband connections will be roughly 10 times faster than the average 56Kbps analog modem. Fatter connections mean wilder, more graphic-intensive Web sites loaded with streaming video and audio clips. Net shopping for everything from clothes to cars will begin to resemble the real-world activity, since buyers will be able to look at products in detail - probably in 3D.
Shopping won't be the only area of change. In the future, you may get most of your entertainment - movies, music, videos - and news on the Internet.
The greatest gains offered by broadband connections may be around-the-clock access to data, resulting in an Internet that is always on in your house. For instance, instead of having to instruct Quicken to surf your bank's Web site and download your transactions, future versions of the program may retrieve the data as the bank's computer processes it. Combine this with the trend toward home networking, and your future abode is likely to contain lots of application-specific devices - all wired to the Net. The very concept of "going online" may give way to an era of instant, universal communication.
