Dr Cerf - Father of the Internet

Dr Vinton Cerf is identified more frequently as The Father of the Internet, than by his working title, which is senior vice-president of Internet communications at telecommunications company MCI.

Does that bother him? "No," says Dr Cerf. He thinks for a moment, then adds, "Well, it's not fair. There's so many people who deserve credit for this," in particular, he says, his close working partner at the time, Bob Kahn.

By any measure, Dr Cerf is an Internet hero. Back in the mid1970s, he and Mr Kahn created the most integral element of the Internet the protocol, or set of technical specifications, which enables one computer to talk to another over a vast worldwide network. Called TCP/IP (/Internet Protocol), the protocol is a language that all computers linked to the Internet can speak, enabling them to exchange files and transfer information.

They do this using a method of data transfer called "packet switching", which Dr Cerf helped develop in 1969 while a graduate student in computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Packet switching is what makes the Internet a stable form of communication for many networked computers.

Rather than sending out a given chunk of data say, an email message as one solid chunk, it is broken into numerous small packets. The packets can take different routes to end up at their final destination, where they are reassembled into the single data chunk. Not only is this an efficient way of sharing telecommunications resources, it also means that a bottleneck in one part of the Internet won't block a message getting through; the small packet just finds another way around. In the case of an email, all of this happens in a fraction of a second.

Last Monday, Dr Cerf himself was divided into packets and reassembled on a video screen for the benefit the business audience attending a business and technology forum at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business. Watching and listening to him, it's easy to see why he's the geek world's chosen adopted father. He's amiable, wry, and full of endless enthusiasm for the digital world to which he is dedicated. Earlier, he contacted The Irish Times from MCI's American headquarters by that more conventional telecommunications link, the telephone.

Should we ring him back? "No," he laughed. "After all, we're the phone company." Fair enough.

Dr Cerf, a dedicated Apple Macintosh man who keeps three Macs at home (he once had eight) along with an IBM laptop "so I can work with the other people in the office" says he wishes he could have made the trip this week in person rather than digitally. He has made several "virtual visits" before, as well as work trips. He has been interested in watching Ireland's rapid adoption of the technology industry, he says.

"I'm very impressed by the strategy Ireland has taken," he says. "You've taken a very well-educated workforce and projected them virtually throughout the world."

Does he think Ireland could step into the position the Government is currently considering an e-commerce hub for this hemisphere? "Your workforce's strengths position you well for that kind of business," Dr Cerf observes. "But the Internet is global in scope, which positions other places as well", such as technology hotspots Bangalore in India and South Africa, he says.

The subjects that interest Dr Cerf these days range wide across the Internet spectrum problems with the inadequate bandwidth on the Internet, for example, which make Web access sluggish and limit the uses to which it can be put. He's interested in alternatives to the copper wire the phone company generally uses in phone lines

cable modems, which would deliver Internet access through the direct pipe of your television cable, and satellite access, which is gaining increased attention.

Then there are telephone costs. Even in the US, where local calls are free as part of the general monthly fee for a phone, telephone charges are an issue, he says. While the consumer pays perhaps $20 a month for Internet access through a service provider, the provider has to pay for bandwidth access to phone lines to send and receive a customer's data packets. "The ultimate way around this is not to use dial-up access to get on the Internet," he says and we're back to cable modems and other alternatives.

He is also very interested in some of the alternative methods of sending out packets. One prospect is multi-casting a technique for distributing the same data to multiple recipients where it is broadcast once and then received by many. At the moment, information is sent on a one-to-one model so The Irish Times, for example, sends out the same email version of the newspaper to its subscribers in several thousand individual broadcasts.

With multi-casting, a solo message would go out and be received by all subscribers. But that, too, is a technology of the future, at least for the Internet at large, because it requires changes in the nuts and bolts of the Internet infrastructure to work the whole Net would need to be multi-cast enabled.

In the meantime, Dr Cerf has his head in the clouds, or rather, beyond he's actively working with Nasa's Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the people behind the recent Mars expedition) to design what he calls an "interplanetary Internet protocol".

"I think it's very timely to work on the problem," he says. "Deep space missions aren't many years away." Astronauts and, he says, planetary colonists will want to use the Internet, but there are special problems with interference and delay when in deep space. What I want is an Internet of Internets on Mars and the Moon, for example," he says.

"This is an initiative which is at the same stage that the Internet was in 1973." No better man to work on the problem than one who has been there before.