The Hindu Business Line : Internet headed for dramatic changes, says ISRO chief

Future landscape
The Internet itself will undergo a substantial alteration as optical technologies allow the transmission of many trillions of bits per second on each strand of Internet fibre-optic backbone network.

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Mangalore Feb.24 With continuous advances in access technologies, including satellite communication, it may not be surprising if Internet services extend to interplanetary Internet backbone in the next few decades, according to Dr G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Delivering the convocation address at the fourth convocation of the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) at Surathkal, near here, on Saturday, Dr Nair said theInternet itself would undergo a substantial alteration as optical technologies allow the transmission of many trillions of bits per second on each strand of Internet fibre-optic backbone network. "May be, in the coming years, like the rest of infrastructure, the Internet will disappear by becoming ubiquitous," he said.

The distributed intelligent network and ever-leaping advances in technology have made prediction of the future - even 15 years in advance - a difficult task. The Internet, which has an all-pervading influence on humankind, really made its appearance seriously in the mid-90s. "Who would have predicted such a scenario in 1990?" he said.

Imagining possible developments in technology and applications thereon a few decades ahead calls for a better understanding of the ways in which performance trends interact with societies' readiness to embrace economic, social and technology changes, he said.

Context-awareness technologies

Even as the Internet becomes ubiquitous, `context awareness' technologies would come to the forefront. `Context awareness' technology means having information about the immediate situation - the people, roles, activities, times, places, devices and software that define the situation, and in a way the context-aware technologies link the social implications as computing moves into the background. He urged young graduates to become part of this technological revolution in the next few decades.

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