Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

The expansion of new-user host access capabilities, such as through a Windows-type environment in a multitasking mode, will dramatically increase the demand for host access software. In addition, a CATV or wireless packet access mode, rather than a twisted pair local loop, tariffed on a per-packet or even fixed-rate basis, will dramatically expand host migration and increase demands on host software.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Wireless access presents challenges of expansion, connectivity, interconnectivity, and addressability. In 1975 and 1976, the senior author was responsible, with others, for establishing the first wireless access to the ARPANET via Intelsat … We shall see the same challenges here, but now we must expand the protocol sets to include SCP/TCP/IP.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

PDAs will create a dramatic change on the Internet. The PDA is a wireless device that identifies with the individual. It is as powerful as many other host-like processors, but it dramatically changes the paradigm. It associates itself with a person at all times, and not with a location … The PDA will challenge the Internet to recognize the user qua user rather than the user qua host.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Development of higher-speed and higher-performance workstations has dramatically change the capabilities of the local host. The individual’s workstation will have full host capability and interconnectivity, and the identification of the host will migrate down to the lowest common denominator, which will now consist of machines that have significant power.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

What does wireless do for the Internet? There are several things that it does immediately: Access expansion – Providing access to places not readily served. This would include, for example, school classrooms and other locations not now served by wire-based telephone. Expanded bandwidth – Using wireless, it may be possible to take 20 to 40 MHz of bandwidth and create and 40 to 80 MBPs bus to allow PDA users to access to a wide variety of services, including multimedia. Terminal identification – Wireless has an infrastructure that will enable the “Find Me!” paradigm to be effected. It has more than the cellular roaming capabilities that we have seen evolve in the older analog cellular architecture.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Access fees must be changed if the New User is to be more than a sporadic user of the service … CATV provides the Internet with a viable and current option for expansion into high data rates and multimedia capability. Wireless communications services introduce new sets of technologies that will create a new local loop access paradigm … The new technologies allow dramatically lower capital costs per subscriber and also eliminate the scale and scope of economies in local access.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

The standard approach to communications system design, starting from the physical layer and working up, is the wrong way to proceed for multimedia… In a multimedia environment, one must, in order to gain user acceptance, design the system from top layers down.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Historically, an Internet user was identified as a host. The user has access via the host and the user was merely an extension of this host. This made sense when the user required access to the host for the host’s shared resources. With the increased power, capabilities, and ubiquity of personal computers, migration of identity from the host to the user is more likely. The development of PDAs, which are now user-resident hosts rather than host-resident users, is a technology-driven change that will cause significant architectural change in the Internet.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Wireless access … will enable extensive host migration to PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and the migration of network identity from host to person, increasing demands put upon the network to “Find Me!”

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

The challenge of multimedia communications is to create what we have called “displaced conversationality.” This means the provision of all sensory inputs and outputs to any human user, at any time and place, required for the transmission of information in order to transact a series of events that lead ultimately to an agreed consensus among the parties involved … This will place significant new demands on the Internet. It raises the question of whether the Internet must now consider raising the level of protocols it supports above just TCP (the transport control protocol) into what we have called the session control control protocol, SCP. Does the Internet evolve into a SCP/TCP/IP network?