Pak Net Limited (Internship report) Chapter-2

Chapter 2

INTERNET

·                    Definition of Internet

·                    History of Internet

·                    Internet Growth in Pakistan

·                    Future state of Internet in Pakistan

 

INTERNET

The shared global computing network. A network based on standards including Internet Protocol (IP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and the Domain Name System (DNS), which enables global communications between all connected computing devices. It provides the platform for web services and the Worldwide Web.

HISTORY

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.

The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.

THE FIRST USER OF INTERNET

Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on Arpanet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN!

The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system

E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work throughout community.

The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.

Libraries began automating and networking their catalogs in the late 1960s independent from ARPA. The visionary Frederick G. Kilgour of the Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC, Inc.) led networking of Ohio libraries during the '60s and '70s. In the mid 1970s more regional consortia from New England, the Southwest states, and the Middle Atlantic states, etc., joined with Ohio to form a national, later international, network. Automated catalogs, not very user-friendly at first, became available to the world, first through telnet or the awkward IBM variant TN3270 and only many years later, through the web.

The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983.

The Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in 1978 at Bell Labs. Usenet was started in 1979 based on UUCP. Newsgroups, which are discussion groups focusing on a topic, followed, providing a means of exchanging information throughout the world. While Usenet is not considered as part of the Internet, since it does not share the use of TCP/IP, it linked unix systems around the world, and many Internet sites took advantage of the availability of newsgroups. It was a significant part of the community building that took place on the networks.

Similarly, BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to provide mail services beginning in 1981. Listserv software was developed for this network and later others. Gateways were developed to connect BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of e-mail, particularly for e-mail discussion lists. These listservs and other forms of e-mail discussion lists formed another major element in the community building that was taking place.

In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial government and research uses.

As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. Other departments besides the libraries, computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources.

While the number of sites on the Internet was small, it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as more and more universities and organizations--and their libraries-- connected, the Internet became harder and harder to track. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available.

The first effort, other than library catalogs, to index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of the software. The commands to search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge of unix to use it to its full capability.

At about the same time, Brewster Kahle, then at Thinking Machines, Corp. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which would index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the files. There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and capability developed, but the simplest of these were made available to everyone on the nets. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers to over 600 databases around the world which had been indexed by WAIS. They included such things as the full set of Usenet Frequently Asked Questions files, the full documentation of working papers such as RFC's by those developing the Internet's standards, and much more. Like Archie, its interface was far from intuitive, and it took some effort to learn to use it well.

Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan, recognizing the need to bring together information about all the telnet-accessible library catalogs on the web, as well as other telnet resources, brought out his Hytelnet catalog in 1990. It gave a single place to get information about library catalogs and other telnet resources and how to use them. He maintained it for years, and added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide information on web-based catalogs.

In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through their local network. A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those who believed in smaller systems with client-server architecture. The mainframe adherents "won" the debate initially, but since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. The demonstration system was called a gopher after the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher proved to be very prolific, and within a few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the world. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a gopher system, you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want.

Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA searchable index of gopher menus. It was purported to be an acronym for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. A spider crawled gopher menus around the world, collecting links and retrieving them for the index. It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to, even though a number of other VERONICA sites were developed to ease the load. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).

In 1989 another significant event took place in making the nets easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system of embedding links in text to link to other text, which you have been using every time you selected a text link while reading these pages. Although started before gopher, it was slower to develop.

The development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andersen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. Later, Andersen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the most successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and education. This policy continued until the early 90's, when independent commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to route traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing through the government funded NSF Net Internet backbone.

Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. It opened up an email connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. All pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online. Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and educational institutions had been paying their own way for some time, the loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect on costs.

Today, NSF funding has moved beyond supporting the backbone and higher educational institutions to building the K-12 and local public library accesses on the one hand, and the research on the massive high volume connections on the other.

Microsoft's full-scale entry into the browser, server, and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based Internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates' determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet. Microsoft's success over the past few years has brought court challenges to their dominance. We'll leave it up to you whether you think these battles should be played out in the courts or the marketplace.

During this period of enormous growth, businesses entering the Internet arena scrambled to find economic models that work. Free services supported by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from the consumer--temporarily. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages, chat rooms, and message boards for community building. Online sales have grown rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers, but the profit margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy, and public trust in online security is still shaky. Business models that have worked well are portal sites, which try to provide everything for everybody, and live auctions. AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in history when it took place and shows the enormous growth of Internet business! The stock market has had a rocky ride, swooping up and down as the new technology companies, the dotcom’s encountered good news and bad. The decline in advertising income spelled doom for many dotcoms, and a major shakeout and search for better business models took place by the survivors.

A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high-speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them spread widely for a while, but this is the low end now. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are predominant now.

Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years, and travelers search for the wi-fi "hot spots" where they can connect while they are away from the home or office. Many airports, coffee bars, hotels and motels now routinely provide these services, some for a fee and some for free.

The next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where almost everywhere is a "hot spot". Municipal wi-fi or city-wide access, wiMAX offering broader ranges than wi-fi, and Version’s EV-DO will joust for dominance in the USA in the months ahead. The battle is both economic and political.

Another trend that is beginning to affect web designers is the growth of smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs, smart phones, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the web on the go, and many web pages are not designed to work on that scale.

As Heraclitus said in the 4th century BC, "Nothing is permanent, but change!"

 

GROWTH OF INTERNET IN PAKISTAN& PROBLEMS

The Internet market in Pakistan is moving in positive direction but there is need for certain steps, such as allowing more competition in the Internet market, making Internet tariff rates affordable for the common man, protecting the service providers' interest as also of the users and positive use of the Internet technology by the individuals the idea that we are living in a global or borderless world is relatively new. The meaning we now attach so easily to the word "global" was unknown 100 years ago when the world was still in the process of being divided up into independent sovereign nation states. 

However, the dramatic events which have taken place in the 20th century - including global welfare, the development of global transportation and telecommunication systems, and the rise of global products, markets and corporations - have convinced many people that we are, indeed, living in a new era in which the economic, social, culture and political structures that shaped relations between people over the past two centuries will be transformed. 

There are accounts of why this is the case, but most emphasized is the central role played by developments in telecom, computer and Information Technology. This historical change is often described as the passage from an industrial to an information age. Electronic information system is facilitating the information communication around the globe within seconds. No more information barriers exist in the world now. Internet has made the world markets more competitive; transaction cost has been reduced; information is easily available to the economic agents. 

IT mania: According to the ITU estimates, Internet subscribers are more than 300 million on the globe and Internet growth rate is 100 per cent per year. Internet took only five years to reach 50 million users. 

After a revolutionary change in the world telecommunications, government of Pakistan has defined broad objectives in the telecom sector as follows: 

The expansion and improvement of the telecom infrastructure in Pakistan to better support economic, social and cultural developments in Pakistan. 

The facilitation of new investment and competition in the telecom sector by developing the legal and regulatory framework The encouragement of increased private sector participation in the development of telecom, in particular by the participation of PTCL 

through the recruitment of strategic investors. 

Encouraging the development of local telecom expertise to promote local research and manufacturing so as to create a telecom industrial base in Pakistan. 

 The protection of consumer interest. 

Government initiative: Recently, the Pakistan government has taken Initiatives to spread the Internet in the country. For this purpose, Internet accessibility has been made available at local charges just by dialing 031. Within few years almost 95 per cent of the 

population will be on line and 450 cities will be connected to the Internet. PTCL is decreasing the higher charges of leased lines for the ISPs. International leased line charges have been decreased five times in the last three years. Currently, 53 per cent reduction has also been made. PTCL is also decreasing the domestic leased lines charges. PTCL has recently decreased the bandwidth charges by 25 percent. On the other hand to enhance the data processing rate, the government has taken steps to ensure using of 128 kilobyte per second (Kbps) loop line by the ISPs. For the time being, ISPs are using the 

64Kbps loop line for the data communication. More advance technologies are available now and advance countries and most of the regional countries are using them. 

Telecom investment has increased in the last few years. Many of the new investors have found attraction in this sector. Now software export is worth $30 million. The government has targeted to increase the software exports equal to $100 million in the coming three years. 

The government of Pakistan has launched an integrated programme to promote Information Technology. Under this programme, new IT Universities, including virtual University and Institutes, will be established under the public and private supervision and a heavy amount has been allocated in the current budget for the promotion of IT in the country. 

In Pakistan, ISPs started to provide services in 1996. Today, the ISP market in Pakistan is booming, and new ISPs are being set up at a regular interval. Currently, the ISP market in Pakistan has a large number, 122 licensees. This shows there is an increasing trend in the 

Internet market business and numbers of ISPs are increasing over the years. According to the PTCL, Pakistan has 250,000 Internet subscribers by the year 2000 but still these are lower compared to other regional countries. 

Countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, India and China have 1.74, 1.85, 4.5 and 12.3 million population online, respectively. It shows that Pakistan still has to travel a long distance even to compete with regional countries. Until now Internet facility is available to large cities only and small cities are too far to have this. 

Internet market in Pakistan is still facing certain barriers and Internet growth rate is not matching up to the regional countries' growth rates. Historically, Internet subscription is related with the numbers of PCs. Internet users are increasing with the increase in the number of computers. Another important variable effecting the spread of Internet is teledensity. Teledensity is a tool for gauging penetration rate of basic telephony. 

Teledensity: Pakistan has just 2.34 per cent teledensity, which, compared to other regional countries, is low but still greater than India. Sri Lanka is having teledensity equal to 2.84, China has 8.62 percent and Malaysia has 20 per cent penetration rate, in the region. PTCL is targeting to have it 5.6 per cent by 2003. Cost of the computers is a factor defying spread of the Internet. In the last few years, although there was sharp decrease in the prices of computers, still these are not in the income horizon of the common people. 

An important thing for the sharp decrease in the computer prices is the free competition in the world markets. Developing countries, such as Pakistan, are really benefiting from the unbranded computers and violation of copyright laws. Unbranded computers have lower prices compared to the branded ones. China, Taiwan, Singapore and some other regional countries are producing inexpensive computer products. 

Copyright violation: On the other hand, due to the copyright violations, computer softwares are available at very nominal rates. 

It is discouraging the software development market in the country and people find less attraction in the software development due to the less reward for their efforts. It is the need of the time that the government take steps to encourage the software developers to work in this field just by making possible the competitive rewards to them. 

This is only possible through the proper implementation of the copyrights law but, unfortunately, trade off lies between the spread of computers and copyrights implementation for the computer softwares for the low-income countries like Pakistan. As the per capita income of Pakistan is just $442 per year and computer softwares are very expensive, it seems that implementation of copyrights will shrink the Internet subscription growth in Pakistan. 

Insufficient phones: Another snag in the expansion of Internet services is inadequate basic telecom infrastructure to meet the demand for telephone. According to PTCL, 3.12 million people have telephones. On the other hand, telephone exchanges are also not digitized completely, till June 2000, most of the telephone exchanges have been digitized, and digital telephone exchange is a necessary condition for the Internet connection. 

Computer illiteracy is another constraint to the spread of Internet. People are not familiar with the use of computers. Now there is increasing trend to be equipped with the computer knowledge. Unfamiliarity with the English language is also causing less Internet subscription. Only a few percent Pakistanis are familiar with the English language. Recently, the government has decided to develop the Urdu softwares, which will lead to increase in the computer usage and ultimately Internet subscription will increase. 

PTCL monopoly: ISPs have their reservations about the non-professional behaviour of the PTCL representatives. They are not finding appropriate response from the concerned persons. Among the 122 licence-holders, only 43 ISPs are operational. Others have not 

started their operations yet. They have complaints against the higher cost of leased lines, bandwidth charges, licence fee, renewal charges and royalty. Most of them are waiting the PTCL monopoly coming to an end in December 2002 to be operational, when market will be competitive and ISPs will not be needed any assistance from the PTCL. At present, PTCL is fully exploiting its monopoly, not allowing the ISPs to use their own networks for the provision of Internet connection. 

This policy is forcing the ISPs to restrain the Internet subscription. If PTCL liberalize the Internet market more, it will help the ISPs to expand their operations and invest more in the telecom sector. This will also as

sist the service providers to use high-speed networks for Internet subscription. It is suitable for the Internet market that PTCL allow more freedom to the service providers. 

Bad consequences: Most important consequence of the Internet is the easy availability of pornography that can lead our youngsters to moral disaster. There is dire need that the government, as well as the guardians, control and check the usage of Internet by the young people. 

Emerging problem in Pakistan is the migration or brain drain to foreign countries. More and more software experts are leaving the country. 

Advanced countries are attracting the young Pakistani IT experts. This situation will hinder the government to achieve the proposed IT goals and until now no serious efforts have been made to stop the brain drain. 

In sum, Internet market in Pakistan is moving in positive direction but there is need for certain steps, such as allowing more competition in the Internet market, making Internet tariff rates affordable for the common man, protecting the service providers' interest as also of the users and positive use of the Internet technology by the individuals. PTA should take bold steps by reducing renewal fee and royalty for the ISPs. PTCL should also reduce the leased line and bandwidth charges more to equate them to international charges. 

A market survey shows that most of the people are using Internet for the entertainment and fewer use it for productive purposes. It is the need of the time to use the modern Information Technology to acquire modern knowledge and produce skilled labour. 

FUTURE STATE OF INTERNET IN PAKISTAN

Internet has become a necessity of life. This necessity is mostly limited to cities because of poor line conditions and small user base in small towns. The internet market is growing slowly with time because to be an internet user, two things are must. One is telephone line or wireless connection and other is computer. Growth of internet is related with the growth of teledensity and computer sales. In cities, both have good growth but on country side situation is not very encouraging. Internet has registered a high growth from 1996 to 2002 and now because of mushrooming growth of small, medium and virtual ISPs, the quality of internet has become a question for the users. Customers have now started saying that all ISPs are the same. So major shift from quality to price has made it difficult for quality conscious companies to sustain and grow in this unique market. Some standards should be laid down by PTA for the establishment of ISPs in Pakistan to maintain the control on the quality of the Internet service. The total Internet users are more than 3 Million and there are 250 ISPs operating in this area. It means that 250 ISPs are sharing the total market of Rs. 10 billion per annum. The market is very small and players are many and numbers of users are not increasing as fast as mobile phone users because of conservative growth of fixed line density in cities. So for ISPs, the only way left is to snatch customers from other ISPs by reducing prices. This decrease of revenue may cause death to the ISPs, because by continuously reducing prices, ISPs can not create high demand as required and this will reduce the profitability in the long run and finally this may cause death of business. ISP market has reached to 12% of the total Pakistan’s telecommunication market as per PTA report. ISP market is the third bigger market after fixed line and wireless market segments. Internet market growth is highly related to teledensity. Fixed line density at present is 3.33 lines per 100 persons and aggregate density (fixed, WLL and mobile) has been predicted to rise to 15% in 2010. From this growth, one can estimate that internet will have high growth in future but it is only possible for ISPs to fetch the market share if they have all kinds of media for internet access (fixed line and wireless).There is a tough competition and customers are now much aware of the prices and have more choices. ISPs have decreased the prices to a level where it has become difficult to maintain quality and now users have started saying that all ISPs are same as in the case of mobile communication services. No body looked satisfied from one company. Now the trend is to keep multiple internet connections from different ISPs.The Internet access through fixed line media only, may not have much faster growth in future because the wireless and mobile teledensity is three times the density of fixed line and wireless (WLL and cellular) growth is very fast and high growth is expected in future also. So the companies totally depending upon fixed line media access my not feel comfortable in terms of revenue and they will face pressure to extend the line of services or diversify. To sustain in highly competitive environment, ISPs have changed their services portfolios. Some have added new high speed services like ISDN, DSL and Wireless Internet Services in their services portfolio and have made their position strong by offering variety of internet access to different market segments varying from low speed to high speed. Some have added in their services portfolio the telephony services through phone cards and some have added software development services and some have added corporate communication solution services. It has become difficult for ISPs to sustain only on the basis of Internet services without adding value added services like web hosting, domain name registration, e-commerce, web development etc. or adding new line of services like telephony, VOIP and WLL services.

The key to success for ISPs is to diversify by adding communication services like Local Loop, WLL and wireless Internet services. ISPs coupled with telecommunication companies will have better prospects and survival than the ISPs providing only Internet services through fixed line media