What Are the Limits of the Internet?

In today’s modern world, the Internet has become the most important medium of communication and information exchange both for personal as well as business interactions. Millions of people all over the world use the Internet for exploring information, accessing and exchanging information, enjoying multimedia communications, buying, selling and keeping in touch with family and friends worldwide.

Among these, the role of the Internet in the field of education is the most distinguishing feature as it has turned around the whole concept of education research in the current world. The Internet has also helped people to save their precious time and effort in the modern-day busy schedule. There are some limitations or disadvantages of the Internet as well; the quality of information available on the Internet might not be always accurate and reliable. Moreover, the Internet, by no means is 100% secure as data manipulation by hackers is always a possibility with the Internet. Similarly, hackers might use your identity to commit crimes which may destroy your identity and reputation. Sometimes, even searching for information on the Internet can be very tedious. The Internet can also mislead children if it is not properly used.

In the meanwhile, the success of the Internet has raised new hopes and expectations for many technology services in various sectors. In the future, the Internet is further likely to expand its boundaries to enhance growth in essential requirements like healthcare, transportation, emergency services, etc through its development of open interface platforms. These platforms will require greater reliability and availability with robust features and properties. At the same time, the advances in content and media, generating a larger amount of multimedia content will also increase data flow exchanged over the Internet. With the increase in requirements and simultaneous advancement in technology, the number of computer terminals, sensors, mobile devices, etc will also grow drastically over the years. Internet bandwidth also remains a concern as nobody knows when it will hit the upper limit, even though there are ways to boost the capacity.

In this scenario, the current Internet may not be able to support these requirements beyond a certain level. The question here is to determine whether the architecture itself will become the limiting factor of Internet growth and deployment of new applications and systems. Hence, researches from various countries are in the process of understanding and identifying these architectural limits to determine the parameters that will drive the future Internet architecture which will enable the Internet platform to meet the above challenges. By considering the above aspects, the future Internet is expected to be a comprehensive communication and information exchange system which will integrate, interface and interconnect today’s internet, public and private intranets to a uniform network which will provide efficient, transparent and timely services to the people.