Internet's future in 2020 debated

The internet will be a thriving, low-cost network of billions of devices by 2020, says a major survey of leading technology thinkers.
The Pew report on the future internet surveyed 742 experts in the fields of computing, politics and business.

More than half of respondents had a positive vision of the net's future but 46% had serious reservations.

Almost 60% said that a counter culture of Luddites would emerge, some resorting to violence.

The Pew Internet and American Life report canvassed opinions from the experts on seven broad scenarios about the future internet, based on developments in the technology in recent years.

The correspondents were also able to qualify their answers with written responses giving more detail.

"Key builders of the next generation of internet often agree on the direction technology will change, but there is much less agreement about the social and political impact those changes will have," said Janna Quitney Anderson, lead author of the report The Future of the Internet II.

She added: "One of their big concerns is: Who controls the internet architecture they have created?"

Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and the inventor of ethernet, predicted the net would be a global connection of different devices.

"The internet will have gone beyond personal communications," by 2020 he wrote.

HOW RESPONDENTS ASSESSED SCENARIOS FOR 2020

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Agree  Disagree  No response
A global, low-cost network thrives  56%  43%  1%
English displaces other languages  42%  57%  1%
Autonomous technology is a problem  42%  54%  4%
Transparency builds better world, even at the expense of privacy  46%  49%  5%
Virtual reality is a drain for some  56%  39%  5%
The internet opens worldwide access to success  52%  44%  5%
Some Luddites/Refuseniks will commit terror acts  58%

One Word For The Internet In 2020:

DEAD

hopefully by the time 2020 comes around you should be able to have DSL or cable connection to the internet no matter where you live even if your way out in the middle of nowhere.

DSL, I have that now. We should have if its still alive by then, we will have T1 or T3

Well apparently there are still small town such as mine that are not compleatly up to date in technology yet. there is cable to some people here but no DSL. Im still using dial up since the cable is expensive and the house wasn't set up right for where the internet needed to be.

I can afely say, no DSL WIll be alive. You have to remember, 10 years ago, there was not internet, and the fastest and most expensive with 22 kb/s... It will all be wireless satellite technology, and maybe some high speed WAN/LAN probably up to 100MB/s in larger towns, at the least it will be 20-50MB/s, and in rural areas, probably Wireless antennas will be used via satellite.

True That! Cant wait till I get that type of internet!

Well, sites will be more graphics orientated, so they really need to create a better graphics handling system, not one like DirectX or OpenGL that relies on technology built in the 90s, and... Physics Cards are a marketing gimmick and not the answer! It will probably mean the next or next one after the next generation of processors and chipsets, but the 64 bit processors are an improvement on the older 8 bit ones if you look in retrospecrive...

Its not that far away, my views are reallistic, as American goverment backbones, trans american and european run at 2000gb/s thats 200000mb/s or 2TB/s for data transfer via fibre optic, for nuclear missle systems and military systems, of which the most powerful computer in the world, by intel has been commissioned.(See thread on this forum by Searching on this forum)

In places like korea and Japan, there internet is up to 100mb!

Im running on T3 or equvilent.

I think that the whole world is ahead of the US in internet fastness. I think I am moving to Japan, lol

Yep It seems other countries that are highly developed like china and japan seem to have better technologies then the USA. in 2020 Ill be 43 years old I hope I can make it that long as ive been a little to overwieght for a good part of my life.