Clavius Distinguished Lecture: The Internet at the Speed of Light

Speaker: Bruce Maggs, Ph.D.
Pelham Wilder Professor of Computer Science, Duke University
Vice President for Research, Akamai Technologies

For the past two decades, Internet service providers have focused on increasing the amount of bandwidth available to home users. But for many Internet services, such as electronic commerce and search, reducing latency is the key to improving the user experience and increasing service provider revenues. While in principle the speed of the Internet could nearly match the speed of light, in practice inefficiencies in the physical infrastructure and in network protocols result in latencies that are often one to two orders of magnitude larger than lower bound implied by the speed of light. Hence, we propose a challenge to the networking research community: build a speed-of-light Internet. This talk explores the various causes of delay on the Internet, sketches out two approaches for improving the physical infrastructure, and explores which applications will benefit most from reduced latency.

Reception to follow lecture.

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