Big Business Gets Involved

• 1996:

• • 10,000,000 hosts on the Internet
  • Voice over IP (VOIP) first scares and then is embraced by telephone companies
  • The public comes online en masse and commercial ISPs suffer outages from rapid growth

• 1997:

• • 20,000,000 hosts on the Internet
  • 2,000th RFC

• 1998:

• • 2,000,000th Internet domain is registered
  • Online stock trading takes off
  • ICANN founded to administer domain name registries

• 1999:

• • 50,000,000 hosts on the Internet
  • Residential broadband (cable and DSL) become widely available
  • Home networking kits hit the market
  • VOIP technologies deployed slowly
  • Huge amount of optical fiber deployed for high-speed international links