Internet – Interview

Interview with Raj Reddy

Reddy: My vision is of an Internet you can bet your life on. It will be everything the current Internet is not—quick, reliable, inexpensive, robust and scalable. I believe these goals can be met. But probably the best solution is to start over. When the U.S. government decided to build the Interstate Highway System, it left the old roads in place, while adding an entirely new set of highways.

In your opinion, will the Next Generation Internet be ubiquitous?

Reddy: Yes. That is, every person on the planet will have access to a computer. In addition, every device on the planet will be able to intercommunicate. It is entirely possible that within ten years information and computing power will be as ubiquitous and inexpensive as electricity is today.

How do you manage such a system and keep it from failing?

Reddy: The Next Generation Internet must be able to monitor, diagnose and repair itself. IBM, for instance, recently introduced an across-the-board initiative called Autonomic Systems that is geared to developing Internet software that can regulate itself in the same way our nervous systems regulate heart beat and hormones.

What would a new Internet cost?

Reddy: The price tag is surprisingly low. When you build an interstate road system, every mile costs around $30 million. But a mile of fiber-optic line costs less than $500,000, and as little as $50,000 if you can feed it into an existing conduit. Furthermore, that kind of high-bandwidth connection could eliminate half of the travel on our physical roads. But the problem is not creating the global wide area backbone infrastructure, it's the economics of getting that high bandwidth connection into every home and office—the so-called last mile problem.

Is any organization equipped to do that?

Reddy: The existing incumbents have no desire to spend any more money because they are all in financial trouble. That leaves the government. The U.S. government should build the Next Generation Internet as it did the Interstate Highways; but in this case—because no one wants to have the government managing the Internet—it should hand over the results of its work to the private sector and then collect a fee of, say, 10 % of the revenues on the resulting value-added services.

What benefits do you foresee?

Reddy: There will be so much bandwidth that we will be able to replace broadcasting with unicasting. Anyone will be able to have any information product they want at any time. But that changes the old business model for music, books, movies, software and every other information product. The current markets will disappear for all the information products that can be converted to bits. That is a threat to many powerful lobbies.

Reddy: Not really, because we'll get there anyway. It's a revolution that cannot be stopped. But it can be slowed. That is, if we don't do anything, it will still happen over the next 25 to 30 years. But if we work proactively, we might have it in ten years.

You were the Co-Chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1999 to 2001. Does Washington have a vision of tomorrow's Internet?

Reddy: I believe there is a vision. But the problem is that no one has been authorized to put the question of the next generation, secure, self-healing Internet on the front burner.

Specifically, what needs to be done to fulfill the promise of the Next Generation Internet?

Reddy: We have to light up the fiber that's already in the ground. Take Qwest. They've installed about 20,000 route miles of fiber in the U.S., each mile of which has about 100 fibers. But they've only lit up one fiber. Why? Because the cost of lighting up one fiber—depending on the size of the network it serves—may be anywhere from $250 million to $500 million.

Is part of the solution to this what Siemens is doing—in other words to increase the bandwidth of a single fiber?

Reddy: Absolutely. We already have commercial systems that can carry 1.6 Tbit/s on a single fiber. That's 1,600 Gbit/s. And systems have been tested in labs that can carry 10 or 20 Tbit/s. That's an opportunity and a problem because, at that level, a single fiber can carry all the world's phone calls. So now you have this huge investment in installed fiber but no use for it—until you create applications that economically put it to use.

What applications do you foresee?

Reddy: In six months we will have a fiber to our campus here in Pittsburgh and the future that you and I have been discussing will be here. We want to build the killer apps—video conferencing, video phones, video e-mail, video on demand. You name it. All of that can be done yesterday.

How do you get the ball rolling?

Reddy: The most important thing the phone and equipment companies can do is to turn all their lobbying efforts toward convincing governments to invest in this technology. And then, just as with the highway system, other industries will be created. They will be tomorrow's equivalent of the motel and gas station chains of the last century.

And the price tag?

Reddy: About $100 billion for the U.S. And I estimate that as little as $10 billion would give us 90 % of the impact. That would jump-start the entire communications industry and put entirely new business areas on the map.

Interview conducted by Arthur F. Pease