Cerf Weaves Interplanetary Net

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October 13, 1999 (8:43 AM EDT)

By Mo Krochmal,

The man who is called the father of the Internet has turned his sights on space.

Vint Cerf, co-developer of the TCP/IP protocol, has embarked on a star trek. Earlier this week at a meeting of the Internet Society of New York, Cerf said by 2008, six satellites capable of beaming messages back to Earth will circle the sun.

Cerf has been working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., to extend the Internet deeper into space than the 22-mile ceiling of radio wave-riding data packets.

While space shuttle astronauts currently use the Internet in orbit above the Earth, future surfers may be able to send instant messages from Mars or log on from Venus. Cerf is designing a planetary communications system, starting with Mars, the next planet away from Earth in the solar system.

The technology he helped design in 1974 will be of no use in this new context, where data packets traveling at light speed take a half hour to go from Mars to Earth.

"TCP doesn't work any more because of the delays," he said.

A new set of protocols are being constructed to deal with distance.

"They are more like store-and-forward e-mail," said Cerf, who is a senior vice president at MCI WorldCom.

The protocols, yet to be named, will be tested in 2001, Cerf said.

On Earth, Cerf is speaking at the eighth Millennium Evening: Informatics Meets Genomics at the White House Tuesday, "explaining to the public how the Internet works," he said.

Currently, the Internet has 179 million users and a penetration rate of 56 percent in Finland, from 35 to 40 percent in the United States, and less than 1 percent in China. Africa has one million users, mostly in South Africa and Egypt, while most users in the Middle East are from Israel, he said.

The low global penetration of the Internet may be due to hurdles such as keyboarding problems for languages that have non-Roman alphabets, per-minute charges for communications, and the high cost of computers.

Still, Cerf said there will be nearly 900 million users by 2006 on the Internet -- and that Net may extend all the way to Mars.