What are the next internet infra problems?

The other 3.5b who aren't online yet. They're the 20 at the end of the 80:20 solution we deployed for all the metro/urban and economically exploitable agri locations. They're the ones with zero persisting power and infra unrelated to telecoms, who share one honda generator with a village, who have to walk 20km to get antibiotics, who pay middlemen a cut of every transaction, who live in debt bondage.

The ITU made a high frontier claim that was their core mission in the 10-20 year window. They made this claim 10 years ago. I'm not seeing strong evidence its being solved, aside from trickle down re-purposing of old 3G systems and Chinese investment in not-very-good infra to offset their coltan mining in Africa.

An accquaintance lives 10km outside metro Bangkok. It's an amazing city and its as plugged in and switched on as anywhere else in Asia, the rats nest of wires is a testament to ad-hock hackery. 10km outside the city margins, its a dead zone for high speed service. And Thailand has a huge rural population.

Rinse and repeat for Africa.

I think solving the "last mile" problem in the US is our greatest problem, especially in rural areas. Too many state and local governments have been paid off by lobbyists to pass laws to block any competition from offering cheaper and better options.

Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awful options. We need legally available competition EVERYWHERE.

There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it.

This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

Interesting question. Do we still have Internet infrastructural problems left?

Akamai solved POPs (point of presence). Equinix solved DC. Both are matching towards table stakes in the context of internet infrastructural. (Not business models). We have lots of under-sea cables / international expansions on-going and planned. And it is now more of a cost efficiency problem, not an infrastructural problem.

We have a decent Ethernet roadmap [1], Terabit Ethernet, Petabit under-sea cable by 2030. If anything I see the only internet's infrastructural problems being closer to the consumer / client side of things where Fibre Cables are not being deployed. But I sense the pandemic has changed a lot of perspective on fast internet and Government are now willing to put more pressure into making FTTH as requirement.

If we look at Mobile, even carriers were a little too optimistic in Data usage projection. 5G proved to be sufficient enough in terms of Tower capacity with enough headroom for expansion without requiring Small / Nano Cells.

It might be different set of infrastructural problems, but more regulations on internet in a per country / jurisdictions basis, which would require Internet infrastructure to adapt to these scenario.

[1] https://ethernetalliance.org/technology/roadmap/

How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra.

30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

Cheap reliable last mile internet. The core and edge is solved.

Around 37 percent of the world's population (2.9 billion people) have never used the Internet (1 in 3 people), per the UN’s 2021 report on the topic.

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-Facts...

I think it's likely that we will see a rise in customs expectations from countries about data that is imported.

The great firewall is the prototype, but as the world becomes multipolar again, regional powers will want to control what kinds of data is imported/exported

Preface: Gonna do my best to not add any commentary for or against the social aspect of decentralization / blockchains. Also gonna be high-level.

I can't help but feel distributed computation is a really really fascinating problem and if the socioeconomic wave we're going through now sustains even a fraction of this current moment it'll be a longterm engineering focus.

It's impossible for me to not recognize that the diff blockchains mirror that of different database designs as the web scaled from nineties. First read capacity was needed to support e-commerce. Followed by social platforms where read/write needed to scale and adopt distributed models and eventual consistency.

Now we're scaling distributed computation and all sorts of interesting problems emerge. If things are gonna turn out to be even remotely what an idealist might lead you to believe we're at the cusp of rearchitecting every single layer of computation. Networking. Machine code compilation and execution. File storage.

PS I did a couple of cmd+f for keywords to find someone answering with this context and didn't find any. That seems crazy.

Provable identity. Yes, you can do Oauth via the google or the facebook but sooner or later we need something that isn't tied to getting all your user interaction data ...

Digital notary. So a third person (digitally) signing a transaction or other document exchange.

I'm pretty sure that BGP is still horribly insecure at its core, which means that all it takes for BGP hijacking to occur is for someone to forget to configure their filters properly.

(See: that time that a bunch of Google traffic started getting routed through Russia. Or the time that YouTube became inaccessible to the entire world)

The biggest challenges are people problems. Why the hell don’t we have fiber to the home in most of America? Regulatory capture and market failures.

Those companies were not created to solve those problems, but to profit by them. Do you think that, say, Cloudflare would like a better web protocol which would be impossible to DDoS?

Three things spring to mind:

1. IPv4 will persist, possibly forever. There's really no compelling reason to migrate to IPv6 other than address space and we've had decades at this point of getting around this problem with various flavours of NAT.

2. Ossification. We've taken the quite reasonable step of discarding any packets or traffic we don't understand from a POV of minimizing threats. For example, there were cases of bypassing security using packet fragmentation. But this makes it increasingly difficult to extend the protocols (eg reliable connectionless messaging aka a reliable UDP).

3. We don't really have a good solution for roaming. If you switch hotspot and get a new external IP it'll typically break your connections. A lot of work has been done to workaround this (eg carrier-grade NAT for mobile IPs) but identifying an endpoint with (address,port) (or just (address) for IPv6) is less than ideal.

Low carbon footprint datacenters, but it requires better software performance. Law of Wirth explains that.

Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones. 5G is not a good solution.

Better security for routers, and generally better software security regulations, which are almost non existent right now. If cars have security regulations, software should, too.

I think our next biggest "problem", though perhaps not an infrastructural one, is one of protocols. We've pushed almost everything into HTTP from my perspective and I think we'll be dealing or solving that next. Perhaps a resurgence of dedicated protocols and the routing/infrastructure to deal with them.

If/when interactive VR experiences go mainstream, network latency will have to be much better--not the average but rather the p99.99 latency. Having an immersive 90-120+ fps world stall/stutter routinely makes it unlivable.

How do you detect and block coordinated troll farm attacks when they use arrays of LTE modems and look like a a bunch of passionate users?

I’m very excited about the challenges explored in the SCION project and recommend having a look at their site and papers https://scion-architecture.net/

I think observability has made a lot of strides but still isn't good enough. I get instant reporting of abstruse errors like API failures but actually understanding why to the point of being able to fix it is still really hard.

Inter-planetary internet... How do you play a game when few of the players are on Mars?

As buzzwordy as it sounds I think between AR/VR/metaverse there will be some infra challenges that extend beyond "just needs a fatter pipe".

A bit like games need complicated netcode to compensate for latency.

As one of the top comments mentioned that most of the people on our planet earth do not have reliable Internet connection especially in the rural and remote areas.

I think the most practical and affordable way of connecting people in the remote and rural areas is by wireless via terrestrial rather than satellite. Regardless of satellite or terrestrial, apparently wireless transmission itself need to be reliable in the face of interference, multi-path and physical obstructions (tree, foliage, building, limited groud clearance, etc).

Most of the efforts for improving wireless technology have been focusing on the urban settings not rural or remote areas for obvious reasons. Ironically the areas where there are less money to be made and there are the places where most of the digital divide are happening.

Personally currently I'm working on a next generation reliable wireless connection technology and the initial results are very encouraging. Hopefully this promising technology can significantly contribute to the improvement of connectivity to reduce digital divide worldwide in affordable manner. Please contact me if you are interested to collaborate on this new technology.

For global initiatives focusing on improving telecom and Internet infrastructure there is Telecom Infrastructure Project supported by the major players including Facebook, Intel, Nokia, NTT, etc:

https://telecominfraproject.com/

I don't know if this is totally related to the question, but I think in a near future will be more and more common to have 4G, 5G, or 6G in your devices (not only phone and tablets, but also laptops and desktops computers) instead of using cable, fibre or others and a router.

I don't know in the US, but in most parts of Europe we have reached such levels of speed and low ping that in not too much time it would be more clever and cheaper to ISPs to have more towers than wired solutions.

Separate out the "central" bit of centralisation.

I think we need DNS for all.

A "secrets service" where people can put a short encrypted message - big enough for an IPv6 address + future extendability - for all to see.

Then users can swap keys, agree on a "secrets service" (or many of them) to store their secret/IP address, and skip any other centralisation altogether.

Apps (open source or otherwise) can then leverage this service to let users simply talk directly to each other.

I don't know if this is in the category that you're asking for but right now there is tons of experimentation with "Content centric networking" e.g. "Named data networking" to better optimise how we load content inside the web. Instead of using an IP to connect to some server of e.g. Google to get content we just say what data we want and load it from where ever (with better prospects of caching).

Don't got the time to write a substantial comment but I would say we are going to have to figure out languages and transpilation next.

It would be nice to have a cable alternative to IEEE 802.15.4/6LoWPAN. IP seems to be the future for home automation. The problem with wireless is that you end up with devices you have to change batteries and reliability issues in high density housing. Laying a twisted pair ethernet cable to each temperature sensor is overkill and too expensive.

I'd like to see more movement away from client-server model to peer-to-peer model, with the easiest and most obvious example being file distribution via torrents for free-to-the-end-user files and downloadables, with the company or whoever seeding constantly but being helped by others who also seed the same files. It would reduce server loads and make file hosting easier and cheaper to the company/host, compared to the traditional server-client model.

That's not the only thing peer-to-peer could be good for, nor is it the only implementation possible, but I'm using torrenting as an example because it's a good peer-to-peer technology that works and has been working well for at least 10 years (whenever trackerless torrents and less reliance on trackers became standardized into the standard)

Good question!

I am biased in this answer because I am building https://hotg.ai/ but I see the world going towards a more fragmented ecosystem. So:

- Portable computations - sending your workloads to any place where the data is

- Good local storage that keeps you compliant with local laws

(edited for format)

IPv4 exhaustion is still probable to happen at some point

China being better than the rest of the world at IPv6

I am collecting suggestions for next generation edge routers here: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/cerowrt-ii-would-anyone-care/110...

We could use a very basic standard so that I don’t have to click on cookie banners for every single website…

Making the network information aware is the next Internet infra problem.

[DISCLAIMER - I run Transcelestial which is building laser comms and we think about this question quite a lot]

Some background maybe first.

There is a massive Global Internet Distribution challenge which works around the cost/bit equation. They are:

1. Undersea cable networks - USD 0.5-1B to deploy over a multi-year project. 10s of millions to maintain with regular cable cuts. Typically now only deployed through consortiums of Internet and Telecom companies. Carry 99% of world’s international data.

2. Inter-City Distribution - National Fiber and Copper networks which connect tier 1-3 cities, towns and villages with a backbone to the nearest Internet Exchange OR telco data center (which in-turn would have a hard line back to Undersea landing stations).

3. Last Mile or within city/urban connectivity - last & middle mile within a city/town connecting homes, offices, towers and DCs.

IMHO the challenges still remain but get worse from top to bottom, costs and complexity often jumping in orders of magnitude from one to the other, with Last mile obv being the craziest.

Telcos nationally in most countries still own most of inter-city distribution and tier 2/3/4 POPs (point of presence), leasing out capacity from POPs to ISPs and Enterprises. The investment in laying these cables is EXTREMELY prohibitive and is the main cause for high Mbps rates, high latency and onerous terms when it comes to in-country network distribution (big e.g. is South Africa). Numbers range from orders of magnitude more expensive (e.g. $1.6B for Telstra Australia in Phase 1, $130-150B for US) than Undersea cables primarily due to Right of Way and operational costs of deployment.

People are now moving from Rural to Tier2-3 cities/towns and also there is reverse-migration from megacities like Manila to Tier2-3 cities/towns (as evidenced by rising cities like Cebu, Bali, Miami, Austin, Pune, etc where housing is more affordable and earning potential remotely is nearly the same). Bandwidth and latency demands are going up 100% Y-on-Y in Tier1-3 cities, especially in WFH COVID times. Starlink & others in LEO wil definitely help with most rural unconnected places (<1-2% of total bulk). Telcos will eventually build out Tier1 cities with fiber more robustly (since they have to deliver on 5G small cell and potentially 6G).

Mid-tier cities & towns where by far the larger total bulk is accumulation will need a LOT of attention and more latency optimized, cost/bit minimized backbones.

Finally, humanity's push to get into deep space in the next decade will require building out infra to support robotic and autonomous missions. Thinking of deep space objects as islands or continents is a helpful model and tightbeaming laser comms to them as "undersea cables but in space" could help address some bandwidth allocation problems in the early days (but local distribution will again have challenges)

Connectivity - we are verging on IoT needing a 24/7 internet connection, coverage is still quite a way from that.

I think it's the same as the current internet ifra problems. And I think latency is the biggest current problem.

Hell, the current infrastructure is the States is still a problem. I don’t even want to think about the next version!

I think that wide acceptance of IPv6 is the next big thing. A lot of ISPs still don't have it.

Electrical waste is an obvious one. The devices that the internet run on are a part of that problem.

Centralization and decentralization. We need an internet that serves the people first.

The infra problem is people. Cloud is creating such value and complexity that companies need to start paying SWE millions to keep up. (Top SWE can easily generate 8-9 fig pnl.) But due to lack of social capital it is universally still seen as a code monkey class.

De-ossifying the Internet is necessary for solving many other problems like the IPv6 and RPKI transitions.

There's a lot of room to optimize latency whether it's removing bufferbloat, L4S, or cISP.

Some way to companies to buy a server as an apliance to serve as a homepage and allá their internet nerds, just plug it yo tour network, setup tour domain and thats it

Re-writing all the software, in short.

It is all a steaming pile of garbage.

next internet infra problems

not tryna be "that guy", but, isn't the internet concerned with interstructure? When you get to a LAN behind a firewall or code inside a walled garden, ok, that's infrastructure.

e.g. Akamai

that's interstructure, though it might require support from your infrastructure