Internet is broken, says original designer

The current system of packet data is not suitable for the uses to which the internet is being put

One of the founders of the modern-day internet has said that the system as it stands is broken and needs replacing.

Lawrence Roberts, who designed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, has said that the current system of packet data is not suitable for the uses to which the internet is being put. Rather than viewing data as packets it needs to be seen as a flow, and this will require fundamental retooling.

"The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it," he writes in an article in the IEEE's Spectrum magazine.

"Directing traffic in terms of flows rather than individual packets improves the utilisation of networks. By eliminating the excessive delays and random packet losses typical of traditional routers, flow management fills communication links with more data and protects voice and video streams. And it does all that without requiring changes to the time-tested TCP/IP protocol."

Traditional routing technologies are unsuited to modern applications like VoIP or video transmission, according to Roberts, because the routing protocols were never designed to handle that kind of traffic.

At present the problems are not serious because telecoms companies have overprovisioned their hardware requirements and can just about handle the data flows. But Roberts estimates that this situation cannot last.

Instead, he suggests that viewing data flows are a contiguous unit for some applications, so that data used in video or voice communications, for example, is identified as such and routers carrying it drop less of those packets.

At the same time, data such as peer-to-peer traffic can be given a lower priority, without the need for deep packet inspection that might intrude on computer users' privacy.

Roberts has formed a start-up company called Anagran to market the new technology.