The global Internet: a new perspective on broadband access to the Internet

With the proliferation of IP applications at the desktop and ATM backbone networks in the core, there is an unique opportunity to blend the public switched telephone network (PSTN) with the Internet in a common ATM-based transport network that combines the strengths of both these networks. This "global Internet" will support both IP and ATM protocols, providing an efficient fit for best effort Internet services as well guaranteed QoS-based services. This paper examines the requirements and architecture of the global Internet. Specifically we define a fully distributed, scalable, peer to peer network with the ability to have multiple administrative entities sharing management of the same transport network, without the inefficiencies of routing flows through those entities. We use distributed object technology to achieve this goal. We compare our proposal to an existing proposal for providing broadband Internet access to the home and show the bottlenecks and the scaling problems with the existing solution.