Cerf: Aussies will demand better broadband

Australians will inevitably demand improved broadband speeds for both upstream and downstream connections, "father of the Internet" and Google vice president Vint Cerf said today.

Cerf, who played a key role in the establishment of the Internet, touched on a wide range of topics, from Wikipedia to the role of Google as a search tool and Windows' malware problems, in a press conference held before giving a lunchtime presentation on the role of the Internet in business at a charity fundraiser in Brisbane.

"I should remind you that Australia has a very high penetration of Internet use; something on the order of 70 percent of the population has access," he said. "A smaller fraction has access to Internet with broadband."

While many market observers have suggested that Australia will suffer an economic disadvantage through a general lack of broadband services, Cerf predicted that even those users already equipped with broadband services would quickly become more demanding.

"A lot of [broadband] for consumers is asymmetric," with upload speeds much slower than download speeds, Cerf noted. "Consumers are going to demand symmetric access to the network over time, for the same reason businesses already demand it. We're going to see an increasing number of applications where users create the content."

One constraint on the growth of broadband might be the increasing use of portable devices for Internet access. Cerf predicted that by 2010, three billion people, or around half the projected global population, would be online. "A very large percentage of people will be getting access with mobiles," he said.

Cerf, who played a key role in the development of the Internet Protocol (IP) as a basic networking standard, also said he was disappointed in the adoption of IP version 6, which he described as critical for expanding the available base of IP addresses.

"We are well within visibility of running out of unique addresses," he said. "I am pushing very hard for IPV6 to be adopted." The biggest problem was a lack of willingness by service providers to switch on the capability, he said.

He also took a sideways swipe at the lack of security in popular operating systems such as Windows. "We could certainly do a better job of building operating systems that are less susceptible to being turned into zombies," he said, adding that no system could be perfect: "I don't think we can defend against [attacks] entirely by technical means."

While Cerf now occupies an executive role at Google, he said it was still surprising to him that basic Internet searches actually worked. "It's amazing how often you actually get useful information out of that process."

He also sounded a note of caution about the increasing reliance on search tools such as Google, especially amongst younger users. "People who think they've done their research because they did a search on the Internet are wrong," he said. "The most important thing you can teach your children is how to evaluate information critically."

The willingness of users to contribute to community-driven initiatives such as Wikipedia was also a source of surprise, he suggested. "What amazes me is the number of people who want to share information and they're not looking for payment. They're simply looking for credit, or just to share. The side effect is that a lot of the information is of very little value."

This was not a new problem, he said, and switching off such services was not the answer: "The antidote for bad information is more information."

Cerf's visit will benefit the Hear & Say Foundation, which is launching a global initiative to train people in making effective use of hearing assistance technologies such as cochlear implants. Cerf's wife Sigrid has had two such implants in the past decade, which has, he said, served as a useful reminder of a basic technological axiom: "It's not just a question of the technology; it's a question of learning how to use it."