According to The Times today “The internet could soon be made obsolete.”, in an article published today The Times states that scientists at CERN, the world largest particle physics laboratory will enable a superfast ‘internet’ which could be available this autumn.

“The Grid” which is remensicent to the network that founded the internet half a century ago (ARPANET) - The Grid has been designed to be a network of supercomputers collaborating processing power to analyse the results of CERN research.

The Grid will ‘revolutionize’ the internet because its network is solely fibre optic and this will eliminate the slow downs in our current internet caused by copper cabling. But isn’t this network occurring already? Telecommunications networks across the globe are being upgraded to fibre optics which makes The Grid a mere example of why we need to convert all networks to fibre optics.

So in response to The Times - No, The Grid won’t make the internet obsolete, it will only drive mass upgrade of copper cable to fibre optics - and that won’t be pervasive for at least the next decade and even then there will always be weak links in the network, when you deal with a network as big as the internet, it becomes impossible to ensure uniform bandwidth.

Whether The Grid is over-hyped or not, it is certainly a necessary kick that telecommunication providers need to get their networks upgraded.