Last year, the Internet Society performed a small study to explore the development and innovation happening at the edge of the Internet, focusing on enterprises, access networks, and data centers.
From this, we observed three evolutionary forms of the Internet that co-exist and complement each other:
- A classic Internet, which is represented by a mesh of interconnected networks across which resources are spread.
- A hybrid Internet, which is characterized by a concentration of resources in content delivery networks (CDNs) and Cloud networks delivered close to the consumer through local nodes and caches.
- A telco Internet, where the resources are brought even closer to end users.
We envision that the hybrid Internet will serve most applications, that is, the data will be so close that current-day Internet CDN models can serve those applications and their users without fundamental architectural changes.
Learn how this will have positive and negative effects on the evolution on service and content providers.
