Author_Institution :
Naval Postgraduate Sch., Monterey, CA, USA
Abstract :
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and now a journalist for Infoworld, has added to his reputation by predicting doom in cyberspace. He went public with predictions of an Internet disaster some months ago, and now there are even conferences on the subject. He claims that too many people are riding the Internet and it simply cannot carry them all. Metcalfe has plenty of empirical evidence to support his dire prediction: power grids in the Northeast have a history of failure, America Online went down for 19 hours during a change in software, and the bandwidth problems that many Net surfers experience all point to weak links in Wired World. Recently Metcalfe suggested that there are too many domain names, and this too will contribute to the crash of ´96. The article discusses the pros and cons of whether the so called Internet crash will actually happen
Keywords :
Internet; computer network reliability; internetworking; system recovery; telecommunication traffic; America Online; Internet crash; Internet disaster; Net surfers; bandwidth problems; cyberspace; domain names; empirical evidence; power grids; Computer crashes; H infinity control; IP networks; Internet; Mesh networks; Portfolios; Telecommunication traffic; Writing;