Professor Mark Handley

Mark will discuss the challenges faced by networking researchers in getting ideas out of the lab and into the core of the Internet. He will examine the consequences that the world faces if growing technical problems underlying the Internet remain unaddressed, while the demands placed on the Internet continue to grow.

"Despite rapid change, both of the underlying network hardware and the applications supported by the Internet, the core network architecture has not changed significantly since the early 1990s.

In some ways this indicates that the founding fathers of the Internet did an excellent job; although they could not have foreseen BitTorrent, MySpace or YouTube, their design still supports such diverse applications rather well. But unnoticed by most users, cracks are beginning to show in the foundations."