Scott O. Bradner thinks the Internet is going to collapse.

Bradner, a senior technical advisor to the university who built Harvard's first computer network, thinks that unless the computing community takes action immediately, the Internet will break down within two years.

The problem, Bradner explained in a talk earlier this month at the Next Generation Networks conference in Washington D.C., is that the size of the road map that hubs at the very center of the Internet have to store in their memory is growing exponentially.

Six years ago, there were 10,000 local networks making up the Internet that the hubs used to forward traffic from one local network to another had to know about. About a year ago there were 60,000 and today, there are about 90,000.

Bradner thinks that in the next few years, that number will expand exponentially--until it reaches a size that the hubs just won't be able to handle.

To avert the crisis, he says, the Internet needs new and improved algorithms for hubs to use to move data to their destinations. But developing those algorithms, he says, will require government sponsorship.

The Internet's Center

The Internet is an enormous web of interconnected computers, each part of a smaller network and without a single center.