Can The Internet Scale Up?

from the questions,-questions dept

Carnegie Mellon has just taken $7.5 million NSF money to look at ways to build the next generation of the internet. The article here includes some interesting quotes from Carnegie Mellon professor Hui Zhang, going against the popular theory that the internet can continue to scale the way it's been built - saying that the complexity of growing this system and keeping it running are becoming overwhelming. From the article, it sounds like he's suggesting we go back to a circuit-switched style network where connections are point to point rather than just tossing everything into the cloud and letting the routers figure it all out. This certainly seems to go against the way many people believe the internet should work, and would lend itself to a much more controlled internet (which governments and certain corporations might like), but sounds like it would be much less useful for actually innovating and getting stuff done.

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