{"id":19357,"date":"2022-11-11T11:17:05","date_gmt":"2022-11-11T11:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.lacnic.net\/?p=19357"},"modified":"2022-11-25T18:52:06","modified_gmt":"2022-11-25T18:52:06","slug":"20-years-of-internet-evolution-and-technical-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lacnic.net\/en\/20-years-of-internet-evolution-and-technical-success\/","title":{"rendered":"20 Years of Internet Evolution and Technical Success"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Carlos Mart\u00ednez<\/a>, LACNIC CTO<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of the Internet goes back fifty years, even longer if one considers some earlier foundational work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post attempts to review the last twenty years of Internet history. Why twenty? Because LACNIC, the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean, is turning twenty, and \u201cround\u201d birthdays are always a good opportunity to look back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The Internet’s Technical Success Factors<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What is it that makes the Internet a success? What makes the Internet different from other networks? The reason we ask this is that, while other communications networks existed during the 1970s and 1980s and some of them even had a global reach, none of them were as successful or turned out to be as significant as what we now know as the Internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Internet’s Technical Success Factors<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>1) Scalability supporting growth<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The number of users connected to the Internet has not ceased to grow over these twenty years, even despite two major global economic crises, namely, the dot-com bubble in 2001 and the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Number of Internet users<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In addition to this constant growth, it is interesting to note that the LAC region is growing faster than the global average.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The traffic measured in GBps\/TBps and the installed transmission capacity (i.e., how many bits per second we could potentially transmit) show a similar pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The physical technologies (optical, Wi-Fi, cellular data) and protocols used by the Internet allow scaling both the number of individual Internet users as well as its total capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Internet protocols allow freely changing transport technologies, which has made it possible for the Internet Protocol of 1980 to function on optical networks that did not exist at that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is accidental but the result of design decisions made during the 1970s and early 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>2) Flexibility in network technologies<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The scalability mentioned above would not be possible if the data communication protocols, we employ were not flexible enough to accommodate different ways of connecting users and increasing capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the ways in which Internet protocols accomplish this is because they follow two principles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n