Making Internet on Mars a reality

BANGALORE: It sounds like the stuff straight out of an Arthur C Clarke sci-fi classic. A technology protocol called InterPlaNet (IPN)-short for Inter-planetary Internet - is currently in use to connect links between spacecrafts on Mars to Earth.

Vinton G Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist, Google Inc, who is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, has been instrumental in bringing out the protocols related to this NASA-funded project.

“We are working on standardizing the protocols so that spacecrafts can communicate and share information across the solar system.”

Cerf was addressing the media here today, on the “Future of the Internet.” Cerf got on board of Google in 2005 and is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet.

Crystal gazing into the future, he said that there would be a further growth in Internet enabled devices. He cited some examples of devices such as fridge, picture-frames and even surfboards that are Internet enabled. “We will see more devices that will create opportunities for new business and services.”

He predicted that users could anticipate new Internet applications on mobiles. However, he said that application developers would have to come up with innovative interfaces to face up to the challenge of the small screen interface.

Cerf put in perspective the sheer growth and pervasiveness of the Internet in the last ten years. “ The Internet has grown from 22.5 million servers in 1997 to 395 million servers now. In the same time frame, the user base grew from 50 million to over a billion as of January 2007.”

While Asia leads the world in terms of Internet users with 389.4 million, the picture is not as rosy for India. Only around 40 million (or 3.5 per cent of the total population) out of a total population of 1.13 billion have access to the Internet. Cerf reckoned that the key to increasing Internet penetration in India would be to get in more locally relevant information on to the Net.

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