One of the Internet's co-creators predicted Wednesday that a proposed "interplanetary" network that will give people the ability "to access information and to control experiments taking place far away" from Earth is set to expand into outer space.
Winton Cerf told an annual Seoul forum venturing into the solar system would bring new rules and regulations too, and he and other experts were working on a set of standards designed to guide space-era Internet communications.
"Finally, the Internet can take us where no network has gone before," said Cerf, who is Google's vice president and chief internet advocate.
He said he and a team of engineers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory would complete a key part of the project -- establishing standards for space communications like those for Internet -- in three years.
Cerf told a separate news conference that new standards were needed because of the huge distances and time delays involved in communication across space.
"This effort is now bearing fruit and is on track to be space qualified and standardized in the 2010 time frame," Cerf said. "Eventually we will accumulate an interplanetary backbone to assist robotic and manned missions with robust communication."
Cerf, seen as a founding father of the Internet with Robert Kahn, marveled at its explosive growth in the last decade, saying it was a trend that would continue.
The number of Internet users has grown 20-fold in the past decade to about 1.2 billion people this year, with the number of computer servers rising from 22.5 million to 489 million, he said.
"Eventually," he added, "the entire world will have access to the services that are available on the Internet."
Source:Xinhua/agencies
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