jsol@BU-IT.BU.EDU (03/17/88)
There have been a number of rumors about the impending death of the ARPANET. Here is the current DARPA position. Brian Boesch ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DEATH OF THE ARPANET AND OTHER PARANOIA There have been a number of rumors throughout the community that the ARPANET project is being terminated. Many individuals and organizations have expressed concern that the service that they have become accustomed to will be terminated. Enough rumors, now a word from your sponsor, DARPA. The ARPANET project in fact is being terminated, but not soon. DARPA is in the business of conducting research into critical NEW technologies that will advance the state of the art. ARPANET is neither new, nor state of the art. It is slow and expensive. ARPANET was founded in the early 70's when 56Kbit/second trunks were on the cutting edge of modulation and transmission technology. Packet switching was unheard of. (An interesting fact is that the average terminal of the day was 30cps giving the net trunks about a factor of 230 faster than the average user interface). Since that time the project expanded into the INTERNET where a number of dissimilar networks could be interconnected relatively transparently. The internet grew from about 63 hosts to over 20,000. The local nets that connect to the ARPANET and other Wide Area Nets (WANs) progressively increased in speed. The result is that while in '73 a large number of users could effectively share one trunk, today, one user on a PC can overload the entire capacity of the ARPANET. In addition to being overloaded, the ARPANET is no longer able to support its other prime function, that of a research base. To conduct any kind of experiment on the ARPANET causes too much service disruption to the community. Finally, the ARPANET is absorbing a significant fraction of our total research budget in what is really a support function. Solution, eliminate the source of the problem. Rather than cutting off the community our approach is to outgrow the ARPANET in a few years. The follow on network experiment will be called the Defense Research Internet (DRI). We are also working in conjunction with other Federal agencies, most notably National Science Foundation, to integrate our networking experiments with the new regional networks, the NSFNET project, and other agency networks. An additional source of confusion is the fact that we are currently arranging for NSFNET to support some ARPANET users, as part of a joint effort to reduce costs by phasing out overlapping service. Our intention, as always, is to do this with minimal disruption to the reserach community. While this happening, we will be putting together the initial version of the DRI apart from the ARPANET. From the beginning the DRI will provide the long distance trunk capacity that the ARPANET lacks. Initial speeds will be 1.5Mbit/second per link (a factor of 25 improvement). The DRI will also be segregated into an "experimental" and an "operational" side. The experimental side will have higher performance, with the possibility of higher degree of net problems; the operational side will support high data-rate applications such as image transfer. The experimental side will be phased from 1.5Mbit to higher and higher bandwidths with the intent of eventually reaching gigabit/second performance; the operational side will take over for the ARPANET. It will be operated by a contractor, and will be funded as overhead on individual users' projects rather than becoming a drain on the Networking research budget. After the DRI is stable, the ARPANET will be phased out. PLEASE DON'T BURY US WITH QUERIES ON THE DETAILS OF THE IMPLEMENTATION, WE DON'T HAVE TIME TO ANSWER THEM. AS DETAILS ARE FINALIZED AND READY FOR PUBLIC DISSEMINATION, WE WILL POST THEM. Mark Pullen & Brian Boesch - -------