In this article I'd like to present personal perspective of the evolution of the Internet over the last decade, highlighting my impressions of what has worked, what has not and what has changed over this period.

Not all forms of internet access were based on dial-up in 1998. ISDN was on use in some places, but it was never cheap enough as a retail service to take over as the ubiquitous access method for the Internet. There were also access services based on Frame Relay, X.25 and various forms of digital data services. At the high end of the speed spectrum there were T-1 access circuits with 1.5Mbps clocking, and T-3 circuits clocked at 45Mbps.

If you were an ISP you leased circuits from a telco. In 1998 the ISP industry was undergoing a general transition of their trunk IP infrastructure from T-1 circuits to T-3 circuits. While it was not going to stop here, squeezing even more capacity from the network was now proving to be a challenge. 622Mbps IP circuits were being deployed, although many of these were constructed using 155Mbps ATM circuits using router load balancing to share the IP load over four of these circuits in parallel. Gigabit circuits were just around the corner, and the initial exercises of running IP over 2.5Gbps SDH circuits were being undertaken in 1998.

The Internet Layer

If transmission has seen dramatic changes in the past decade then what has happened at the IP layer over the same period?

The glib answer is "absolutely nothing"! But that answer would be gliding over a large amount of activity in this area. We've tried to change many parts of IP in the past decade, but, interestingly, none of the proposed changes have managed to gain any significant traction out there in the network, and IP today is largely no different from IP of a decade ago. Mobility [1], Multicast [2] and IP Security (IPSec) [3] remain poised in the wings, still awaiting adoption by the mainstream of the Internet.