Future of the Internet

The Future Internet:

An evolving convergent Internet of things and services that is available anywhere, anytime as part

of an all-pervasive omnipresent socio–economic fabric, made up of

data

advanced services to business and citizens.

This definition comes from "The Future Internet" Report from May 2011 complied by UK, Future of Internet Group.

This article outlines how the Internet is constantly evolving and most issues and concerns related to the Internet fall under 3 main categories:  converged services, shared data and infrastructure.

Converged Services

Companies will want the ability to not only have a web page but for people to directly interact with it.  This is already happening but trends are moving all websites to this direction.  First we had webpages that showed what a store had, then you had the ability to purchase and find store locations.  Going further, stores do and will have blogs for customers to share, places for customers to interact with customer service representatives and move to other websites that offers complimentary goods or services.

Shared Data

Customer data, patient data, shopping data, school related data - all online, all potentially available for customization, ease of data retrieval and ease of personalization.  Technology companies are now moving toward offering cloud computing solutions to help move along all of this data, easier, faster and more efficiently.

These statistics are quite amazing to think about:
In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured and
replicated was 1,288 × 1018 bits (161 exabytes or 161 billion
gigabytes). This is equivalent to about 3 million times the information in
all the books ever written.
• Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital
universe was estimated to increase more than six-fold, from
161 exabytes to 988 exabytes (see Figure 8).
Images and video are
fuelling this growth
• Three major analogue-to-digital conversions are powering this growth:
film-to-digital image capture, analogue-to-digital voice, and analogueto-
digital TV.
• Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world, from
digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security
cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe. They
are replicated over the Internet, on private organisational networks, by
PCs and servers, in data centres, in digital TV broadcasts and on
digital projection screens.

Solutions to moving this amount of data has to be ever evolving.

Infrastructure

Connectivity, connectivity, connectivity!  Everyone wants to be connected 24/7 from multiple devices.  But how can a network handle this? At one time, no one thought we could ever run out of IP addresses with IP4 and sure enough we have.  Implementing IPv6 and increasing access to wireless are going to be key.  The number of handhelds has increased by 6 fold over the past 10 years.  That number is believed to increase to  50 million connected devices by 2020.  Will be have the capacity or will it all shut down?

The future....The important concept in this article I think is that of evolution.  The Internet is constantly evolving.  Companies, governments and people are going to have to learn new ways to use the Internet, support the Internet and make it work for the benefit of all.