History and background of IP networking

History and background of IP networking

In 1676 Sir Isaac Newton wrote to fellow scientist Robert Hooke to try and explain his scientific achievements. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," he famously said.

The comment resonates centuries later as we seek to explain the beginnings of the internet and Internet Protocol (IP) networking.

No one person can be handed the plaudits for coming up with the technology that lies behind the internet, but it is certainly the work of scientific giants.

While British-born scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee can take a large amount of credit for the work he did in the late 1980s at Geneva-based laboratory CERN, he can only be credited for inventing the World Wide Web, the network of servers and browsers used to view content transmitted across the underlying internet.

Instead, several US scientists must be credited for developing the internet itself, the underlying network and transmission technologies responsible for sending packets of information around the world.

The infrastructure is based on Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which was first theorised by Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. But it was not until Vint Cerf became involved in the 1970s that the internet really began to take off.

Working with Bob Kahn, Cerf gave the internet its first real demonstration in July 1977 when packets of data (bits of information) were sent on a 94,000 mile round trip from the US via Norway and London. "We didn't lose a bit," Cerf wrote in his paper How the Internet came to be.

Find out what the latest IP-based communications can do for your business at the vnunet.com Networked Office hub.

From these humble beginnings the rise of the internet exploded in the 1990s until it began to overshadow existing legacy communication technologies, such as circuit-switched phone networks and fixed line data networks.

But while IP networking has been around for some time in backbone networks, it is only recently that companies have begun to look to it as a suitable technology for their own private networks.

There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was a lack of motivation; legacy networks were working well and, as a result, investment in new technology could not be justified.

However, this has now changed. New applications driven by the consumer adoption of broadband technology have put an undeniable strain on existing legacy networks. Service providers faced falling behind if they couldn't provide their customers with enough bandwidth to support these applications. In short, companies faced falling behind if they didn't upgrade.

In fact, one of BT's largest ever investments, a multi-billion pound project dubbed the 21st Century Network, is a huge end-to-end IP-based network which will replace the myriad existing networks and legacy technologies currently in place.

In the words of BT, its 21CN will allow customers to "access any communications service from any device from anywhere - at broadband speed".

It is, in short, a new start: a move that BT hopes will provide it with a backbone network good enough to support applications well into the 21st century while providing the efficiency savings that IP networks deliver. To the tune of £1bn a year.

However, at the other end of the scale the traditional technology drip-feed has now reached smaller companies to such an extent that they can begin to take advantage of the cost savings and efficiency improvements that IP networking has to offer.

But, why now? The answer is twofold. First, many experts believe that the internet has finally come of age, that the security and reliability issues that blighted the dotcom boom era have finally been solved. In turn, this has led to businesses trusting the internet more and placing more of their important business applications online.

The second is that real business applications that run across IP networks are now available. It is no longer a case of technology for technology's sake, but rather technology because it is a cost-effective way to achieve competitive advantage. And, crucially, technology that works.

There are many examples of this. Voice over IP allows phone calls to be routed over IP networks and the internet at a fraction of the cost of traditional circuit switched services. IP-based video conferencing can remove the need to visit customers, suppliers or business partners in person, IP-based virtual private networks allow private business to be conducted on public networks … the list goes on.

In short, because all of these different communications technologies are being converged on a single IP-based network, flexibility, as well as simplification, is greatly improved.

Ian Sherring, business development manager for unified communications at internet giant Cisco Systems UK & Ireland, said that his company has shifted eight million IP handsets globally since 1999.

Sherring explained that early concerns over security, reliability and scalability have all but disappeared, and that convergence has moved on to the third phase, which he refers to as the "convergence of user experience".

What this means is that applications, whether they be video, PowerPoint slides, voice or data, can all be unified on the same platform so that everyone can access it simultaneously.

The underlying network is standardised, therefore anything you want can be run and accessed over it. In essence, this is the story behind convergence.

Find out what the latest IP-based communications can do for your business at the vnunet.com Networked Office hub.