Predictions from the Original Net Surfer

Nicholas Baran

This is "an amazing period of jockeying and adjusting" of the Internet, says Vinton Cerf , one of the Internet's founders and an MCI senior vice president and head of the company's Internet initiative.

By the year 2000, Cerf expects that financial instruments will be well established on the Internet. "We will probably have picked a few if not one method for moving money around the network. There is a strong desire for a single common protocol for transaction processing." As far as bandwidth is concerned, Cerf expects cable access to the Internet to be prevalent "but not necessarily from whom you'd expect. The power compan ies may be the distributors." He also expects backbone transmission speeds to reach 80 Gbps using multiple light frequencies. "Basic transmission capacity will be readily available--switching capacity [router technology] may be more of a problem."

Cerf said he was surprised how rapidly the Internet has penetrated the business community. The turning point came in 1990 with for-profit enterprises, such as Lexis/Nexis and MCI Mail. His only regret is that he and his colleagues "never had a chance to try it a second time." They had originally planned to do a "complete reimplementation based on lessons we had learned." But the Internet turned out to be so useful that "no one wanted to let go of it."

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An Internet Founding Father

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