International Internet Day: What Internet Means for Us

International Internet Day celebrates a very critical turning point in the history of humankind.

For most of those who were then alive (I wasn't),  29th October 1969 was a normal Wednesday. However, for people at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute, it was anything but. They had sent a message across, and ARPANET was online.

52 years later, and almost 60% of all humanity uses the internet, and goes through exabytes of data per year. The International Internet Day commemorates that fateful day in 1969, and today, we look ahead to what will be possible soon.

The Origins of Internet

The story of the internet is one which we don't pay attention to. It took most of the second half to develop the internet and put it online, therefore, it's safe to say that some things happened.

All of it started at the inaugural UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris in 1959 when JCR Licklider came along the process of time-sharing. In 1963, he had put forth a concept of connected computers, called the "Intergalactic Computer Network". And he advocated fiercely about it; using his position as the director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at ARPA.

His concept came to fruition in the form of ARPANET; he had left the ARPA before work on it began. The network had first connected UCLA with Stanford, UCSB, and the University of Utah; the four were the sites of the first network hosts. On 29th October 1969, at 10:30 PM, SRI programmer Bill Duvall and UCLA student programmer Charley Kline sent a command from UCLA to Stanford. Initially, though, the network crashed after two letters - "lo", from the command "login". The first actual login was made an hour later than that, but the two letters transferred heralded an era of widespread connectivity.

By March next year, the network had already reached the Atlantic Coast of the US. Within the next decade, the number of IMPs connected to ARPANET went from 9 to 213. By the end of the 20th century, we already had the likes of eBay and Amazon on the dial-up internet that we had back then.

When the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, Vinton Cerf, one of the pioneers of the internet, wrote a poem titled "Requiem of the ARPANET". The poem read as follows:

It was the first, and being first, was best,

but now we lay it down to ever rest.

Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.

For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years

of faithful service, duty done, I weep.

Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

Internet is Essential: COVID-19 and Connectivity

Today, it is impossible to understate the impact the tech has had over the past couple of decades, especially since the last 10-15 years or so; International Internet Day marks a day so crucial to us, that without the internet, you won't be reading this.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in the early days of 2020, and by far has been the most disruptive pandemic to date. It brought the whole world to a shuddering halt. India, with its 1.38 billion people, went into a total lockdown - the largest of such events in the history of humankind. That much we know. What we also know is the impact internet, and connectivity has had on our lives during the pandemic.

To condense this extremely complicated phenomenon into numbers would be a very bland task. However, to give some context, global internet usage went up by 70% during the pandemic. What's more, this unprecedented spike in usage has seen network operators improve their network's reliability. In 2020, according to the Impact Report by the Intenet Society, the number of routing incidents went down by almost 20%.

As everyone stayed home, new use cases such as work-from-home and e-learning soared in usage. Gartner had reported in a survey that almost 82% of the companies will allow their employees to work remotely at least some of the time moving forward.

Along with this, e-commerce saw a rise that was similar to the last 10 years' growth, combined.

These verticals are a few of the examples that saw a paradigm shift during the pandemic. Healthcare evolved massively throughout the year; from telemedicine to contact tracing, we have come a long way in dealing with a large-scale health crisis.

COVID-19 changed the way we do a lot of things, and without the internet, it won't have been possible.

What the Future Holds for Internet and Connectivity

TL;DR: the internet will make a lot possible.

In the broadest sense, connectivity enables us to harness the information that is going around at any given time. Using that information, we can do things.

Changing How We Do Networking

First, we are experiencing a paradigm shift in the very way we do internet. Since 2019, 5G has gathered steam across the world, with commercial networks switching on across the globe. The next generation of networks has propelled the network speeds to dizzying speeds; the theoretical limit is 100 gigabits per second. 5G has been making and will make a lot of use cases possible, such as connected vehicles, smart, automated factories, smart cities, and whatnot.

Continuing, the technology that makes the internet possible has been evolving alongside it. As more and more enterprises make the internet their home, the hardware has been playing its part, becoming the foundations of connectivity. 5G networks have become the first generation of networks being used as a platform, then as a means of delivering connectivity. Networks themselves are being deployed on the cloud; making them more disaggregated, more centralized. By bringing core NFV to the RAN, Virtualized RAN, or vRAN can help telcos reduce cost, increase capacity and reduce time-to-market. Open RAN is one of the key applications of vRAN. Along with C-RAN, and soon 5G RAN, networks are moving to the cloud faster, reaching more people, and supporting more traffic than ever before.

Satcom, in particular, the new generation of low earth orbit satcom constellations, has emerged as one of the most attractive options to deliver internet. The concept has been around for decades, however, companies like SpaceX and OneWeb have changed the game drastically. Basically, the constellations will deliver internet from space, thus reaching even the most remote of regions.

New Ways of Using the Internet

Right now, network operators are looking for ways to use the new technologies, and hence, the internet. The term "use case" has been used a lot here, and everywhere else. But what does it entail?

We can also call a use case, an application of the technology that is available at the moment. For 5G, there are seemingly at least a million different use cases. However, some of the most crucial use cases for the new networks are all enterprise-related. From automation in factories to wider Industry 4.0 applications, 5G and its high-speed, and low latency holds the ability to make a lot of previously impossible use cases, possible.

Google, and other companies, have been working on smart, automated, connected vehicles. So far, the efforts had been unsuccessful because of one key reason; the internet was not fast enough. Specifically, the latency was too much for computers to make decisions in the real world. Now, though, with latencies as low as 1 millisecond, vehicles can be more connected than ever. Though we are still a bit far from having no human eyes on the road, connectivity sure is heading towards that.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. With plans of connecting billions of IoT devices to networks, companies can now better automate their manufacturing processes, saving a lot of time, and money. All made possible because of the internet, and the technologies that make use of it.

The Ubiquity of Internet

Our ability to do language remains one of the key reasons why Homo sapiens are the only species of the Homo genus. Language, and hence connection, has resulted in modern society. Millions of years of evolution have resulted in today's world; with the power of internet and connectivity, we are creating possibilities people just 20 years ago might have thought impossible.

Now more than ever, we need to realize the need for connectivity as one of our fundamental needs. We need to reach all the unconnected corners of the world and bring them the benefits being connected brings.

From enterprise to individual, there are tens of use cases that will shape the world in the future. All of them were made possible by the internet and the pioneering folks at the ARPANET project all those years ago. By celebrating International Internet Day, we remember those pioneers and all the transformation that has followed since.

The world is heading towards a connected future.