Taster Course: Broadband

It's useful to have a very brief history of the Internet tucked away at the back of your mind. The whole enterprise began as an experimental project called ARPANET organised by the US Department of Defence.

It was intended to link researchers and resources together and to enable information to be transferred between them with ease.

It was conceived as a "robust network". This meant that there were many connections between each main computer so that, if there was a point of failure at one location, information could still find another (albeit indirect) route to travel.

In the Cold War, "point of failure" was a euphemism for nuclear strike.

The American military decided that there was no future in the project and so it was taken over and developed by the academic community.

This is the reason why we have such a free flow of information over the Internet. As the cyberpunk author, William Gibson, puts it, "Information wants to be free".

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the technologies were developed which produced the infrastructure for the global network that today we know as the Internet.

The creation and growth of the Internet has, therefore, been patchy to say the least.

Because of this, no one agency owns or polices the enterprise. And because of this, it has always been difficult to codify and maintain any set of standards with regards to how the various, competing technologies are implemented and developed.