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>> As more and more bandwidth heavy applications and websites crowd the Internet, web congestion becomes an increasingly difficult challenge, but scientists at Silicon Valley's inaudible Research Lab, PARC, are working on the problem developing new technologies to re-architect how the Internet runs. With me is Van Jacobson, a Research Fellow at PARC. Van, thanks for joining me today.
>> Van Jacobson: Thank you for having me.
>> Before we get into the issue of web congestion, we wanted to talk a little bit about you. You're a scientist and one of the key contributors to developing the original protocols in laying the foundation for the Internet backbone so tell us a little bit about your background. It sounds like there's a lot that you've done in the past.
>> Van Jacobson: I was working at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab making control systems for big particle accelerators that took me into computer networking in the early 70s and it was more interesting than accelerators so I kept working on it and for about 25 years I ran the Network Research Group at LBL then I left there and spent a few years at CISCO as inaudible scientist. Left Cisco to do a startup called Packet Design with Judy Estrin and then in 2006 went to PARC and started working on Content Centric Networking.
>> So that's the technological breakthrough, content centric, do I have that right?
>> Van Jacobson: Yes.
>> Content Centric Networking. CCN as you sometimes call it and this is going to help keep the Internet from getting overloaded. Explain how it works.
>> Van Jacobson: If you look at how people use the Internet, they're asking for some piece of content they want; a video they want to watch, song that they want to download from iTunes, Tweets that are coming out, but the Internet was originally designed before we had this notion of data that people would want and it was designed for computers to make phone calls to other computers and that's a really inefficient way of distributing content. You think of having to get your TV programs by making a phone call to the TV station that kind of works out where you're making the phone call but at the TV station they can be getting hundreds of thousands of calls all asking for the same stuff and the goal of Content Centric Networking is to get out of this phone call world and instead ask the network for what you want; not say who you want to talk to but say what content you want and that lets it be far more efficient at doing distribution.
>> So what's the danger of proceeding with sort of the status quo that we have?
>> Van Jacobson: The problem is that content distribution has reached the scale where what we have simply doesn't work and an easy example of that is if you remember the Susan Boyle phenomenon of a couple of years ago over a period of four days a 140 million copies of that video were played by YouTube to people watching it all over the world and if you multiple the bandwidth of that video about a megabit times 140 million viewers, there's no technology, not communication's technology on the planet that can deal with that kind of load. YouTube can handle it because they fool the Internet. They're not really a place that you make a phone call to. They're actually a big distributed content source. They're spread out all over the planet so they don't get the kind of traffic concentration that would present something from working, but basically Google is the only place that can do thought.
>> And if you're not Google tough luck?
>> Van Jacobson: Exactly. I think that's probably not a world we want to end up with. There's a lot of good ideas that people have for content inaudible and things like Twitter and Facebook that are easy to think about, are easy to rule out at a small scale but making them Internet scale is really hard because you have to invest all of your effort in fooling the Internet and we'd like to make a Net that works the way that people think it works; that you ask for what you want and you ask the Net directly for what you want and it can give it to you.
>> You shouldn't have to be a billion dollar company to be able to distribute information on the Net in other words.
>> Van Jacobson: Exactly.
>> So what will it take to make CCN a reality? You're going to be facing some challenges I would imagine.
>> Van Jacobson: We spent the last five years at PARC doing an open source prototype of the protocols. They're available at a site called CCNX.orgs. Anybody can download and play with them and the biggest challenge is rolling it out and getting people to try it in different environments, show that it works, get the rough edges off but we're using it to solve problems now with big companies like Samsung trying to make the mobile environment work better.
>> Well, I think all the consumers of web information and video fanatics are pulling for you so thank you so much for explaining this to us.
>> Van Jacobson: Thank you for having me.
>> Thanks for watching.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
