Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Networking: Four ways to reinvent the Internet

Nature volume 463, pages 602–604 (2010)Cite this article

Subjects

The Internet is struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing demands placed on it. Katharine Gammon looks at ways to fix it.

The Internet is feeling the strain. Developed in the 1970s and 1980s for a community of a few thousand researchers, most of whom knew and trusted one another, the Internet has now become a crucial worldwide infrastructure that connects nearly two billion people, roughly a quarter of humanity. It offers up something like a trillion web pages, and transports roughly 10 billion gigabytes of data a month — a figure that is expected to quadruple by 2012. Moreover, those two billion users are exploiting the network in ways that its creators only dimly imagined, with applications ranging from e-commerce to cloud computing, streaming audio and video, ubiquitous mobile devices and the transport of massive scientific data sets from facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, based near Geneva, Switzerland.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Authors
  1. Katharine Gammon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Additional information

Katharine Gammon is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.

Related links

Related links

Related links in Nature Research

Nature Web Matters: Internet Computing and the Emerging Grid

Related external links

Keren Bergman

GENI

Steven Low

Davis Social Links

Jonathan Turner

NSF Future Internet Network Design

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Gammon, K. Networking: Four ways to reinvent the Internet. Nature 463, 602–604 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/463602a

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/463602a

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing