The wide area network (WAN) as we know it is changing, and it’s thanks to the growth of video, big data, mobility and consumerization of IT. As these bandwidth-hogging trends make an impact on corporate WANs, IT is seriously considering the Internet for WAN connectivity. Broadband Internet is where bandwidth is less limited; it’s the most logical connection for cloud computing and SaaS; and it’s more flexible to boot.

To keep up with the evolving workforce, the WAN must be redefined. The new WAN will no longer be made of permanent virtual circuit (PVC)-type connections, like frame relay, which must be reprogrammed and configured with every change. The private WAN as we know it will be replaced by Internet traffic or IP. It will be the only transport flexible enough to keep pace with changing network traffic patterns — which no longer travel soley in the private WAN between branch offices and the data center; traffic will travel between branches and mobile workers, cloud networks and data centers.

“When the majority of our employees were in company locations and didn’t move, those older WAN technologies were fine. Now that we have highly mobile workers, IP is the protocol that fits the workforce best, and IP moreso than the Internet, [because] IP is highly dynamic, flexible and resillient. With Internet and IP technologies, you don’t need to do any reprogramming; it just knows where to go,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.

And while trading out a leased line for an Internet VPN is more the exception than the norm, enterprises are certainly trending that way for WAN connectivity.

As it turns out the Internet is already broken and has been for some time, as was discussed in the 2-hour long panel discussion on “How to fix the Internet” at Future-Net last week.

Why did the Internet come to be?

Nemertes Research president and panel discussion moderator Johna Till Johnson pointed out that the Internet is the largest creation the human race has ever put together collaboratively.

Furthermore, Johnson said “the Internet was invented because people wanted it to be invented.”

The Internet was born purely out of our human desire to connect — not because of any government mandate or religious decree.

But because no one person or organization can own the Internet, and because of it’s incredible boom and rapid success, many issues arise that cannot be addressed quickly enough. No one person or entity can fix the issues.

The Internet is broken

What are these issues that break the Internet? The panelists ultimately boiled problems down into four factions:

• Routing scalability: The routing table continues to grow and so do the requirements to support BGP.
• Security: Internet crimes have risen at phenomenal rates, making critical data harder to secure.
• Bandwidth: Applications like voice and video are only getting bigger and more demanding of resources, particularly of bandwidth.
• IPv4 address depletion: Seriously. IPv4 addresses are going, going gone.

Can the Internet be fixed?

Much of the conference was spent looking at ways to resolve the last point: IPv4 address depletion. NAT was out of the question, because, on top of it not being enough to stave off address depletion, it was also deemed “poor man’s security,” (let alone a nightmare for IPv6 transitioning).

A viable answer was IPv6, though it wasn’t the only answer. Much to my surprise, two other solutions — namely Cisco’s LISP and PNA — came up as considerable options. (See SearchTelecom.com’s Is IPv6 a sure thing? blog entry for more on this.)

Although IPv6 was not the lone answer, it appeared to be the final answer. The panel — ranging from Mike O’Dell from New Enterprises to Fred Baker at Cisco Systems — all agreed that IPv6 really was the way to fix address depletion in the end.

This was not to say that they were satisfied with the answer.

Panelist Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications, quipped “We got IPv6 pregnant — now we’ve got to marry her.”

ARIN president and CEO John Curran explained part of the unhappiness toward IPv6 is that there are no new features. In IPv4 there’s IPsec for automatic security and DHCP. IPv6 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that IPv4 has.

IPv6 also only solves IPv4 address concerns. Bandwidth, security and routing scalability aren’t solved by IPv6 and, in some cases, are exasperated by it.

Who broke the Internet and can they fix it?

Ultimately, who’s to blame? The application developers for making “craplications;” the networking professionals for nating; the data center guys — “everyone’s to blame,” the conference panelists mutually concluded.

We all have played our part in breaking the Internet. Perhaps it’s time to collectively fix it… Now, if we only knew how…

About a decade ago, if you recall, Mr. Gore reportedly took some credit for inventing the Internet, or so the press reported and later George Bush sarcastically promoted during his campaign for U.S. president. In reality, Gore never did say he invented the Internet, but did maintain he had some influence in its growth when as senator he promoted the use of the Internet and supported its development. In any case, we at least think Mr. Gore is deserving of a few birthday cards and perhaps a small piece of IP cake.

Looking back over the years, the Internet has evolved from a klugey and clunky messaging and file sharing pipeline into being the networking backbone for most of what is happening and will continue to happen in enterprise computing today. The evolution of the Internet has sparked a major revolution in computing, creating new business models in collaborative messaging, software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, unified communications, and managed network services.

As a result of the increased activity on the Internet, networking architectures are changing dramatically resulting in more robust wired and wireless structures and more capable and higher-performance WANs.

But, like everything in life, the longest and most remarkable journeys begin with the first step, and the development and launch of the Internet is no exception.  Most people agree (including, we are sure, Al Gore) the Internet was born on Sept. 2, 1969 when two computers at the University of California, Los Angeles  exchanged small snippets of meaningless data in a first test of the Arpanet, an experimental military network.  The first connection between two sites happened almost two months later when the  computers at UCLA “talked” with those at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA (although the network crashed after the entering the first two letters of the word “logon”).

Subsequent key events over the years included:

- The development of TCP by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974, allowing multiple networks to communicate;

- Creation of the domain naming system in 1983, bringing to life such now common appendages as .com, .gov, and .net.

- The creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, first developed to remotely control computers at CERN;

- The development of the Mosaic Web browser by Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois in 1993, the first Internet platform to combine graphics and text on a single page.

More important dates in the evolution of the Internet, from its birth to current state, are available in an  Associated Press dispatch on Google News.:

Happy birthday, big guy, and best wishes for many more to come!