Nothing stands still — progress is literally on our heels. Life is accelerating, and with it, access to the global network is accelerating. Some 20 years ago, we used the Internet at speeds up to 56.6 Kbit/s, but today the gigabit channel in the apartment is not some kind of curiosity. In this article, we will discuss how the Internet may change in the coming decades. I must say right away — I do not pretend that it will go exactly as described, but some conclusions can already be drawn right now. Which is what we're going to do.

As already mentioned above, many providers now carry fiber-optic cable to their homes or apartments. This means that the speed of the home Internet will increase — while service providers offer up to 1 Gbit/sec., but over time the speed will increase. Just imagine: many people are already downloading a conditional 10 gigabytes in a little less than a minute.

But so far, providers are not in a hurry to give high speeds — a lot depends on the global infrastructure. For example, not all data centers can provide high speed to the user only for the reason that the data center is located far from the end user. There are a dozen other servers along the way that are passing traffic — the speed can be significantly reduced. But access to materials that are "locally", that is, inside the provider's network, is possible at a very high speed.

By the way, the so—called "terabit" Ethernet protocol is currently being developed, which will transmit data over the wire at speeds up to 400 Gbit/sec. By the way, the speed record through a fiber-optic cable is 27 Tbit/sec., but in practice no one "accelerates" data transmission like that, because this requires large capacities of network equipment.

We can safely assume that some 10 years will pass, and there will be no "megabit" tariffs - only gigabit ones will remain.

Wi-Fi is also developing by leaps and bounds. There is already Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), which gives speeds up to 11 Gbps. The approach is 802.11be, called Wi-Fi 7, which in laboratory conditions has already shown speeds of up to 46 Gbit/s. The maximum speed of Wi-Fi actually depends on when engineers are faced with the inability to squeeze even more out of the protocol. But we can safely assume that Wi-Fi will not stop at version 7, but will go even further. The development of new Wi-Fi protocols is hindered by the fact that people do not change their devices very often, and old gadgets do not support the latest protocols.

Well, let's move on to the most interesting thing — the development of 5th generation networks, the speed of which in ideal conditions can be up to 20 Gbit/ s, but in practice, most likely, access to speeds of 1-2 Gbit / s will be given.

With the development of 5G and its active implementation, a lot can change. It is possible that in some areas cable Internet will not be needed at all. Why run a cable if there is a high-speed 5G? Here we can assume that cable providers may cease to exist in large cities if it is possible to achieve a stable connection with speeds up to 5-10 Gbit/s.

Why pull the cable if you can squeeze such a speed over the radio channel? IoT devices will also be "delighted" with the introduction of 5G — various smart home and city systems that can work autonomously without a cable connection at high speed.

Here you can also imagine that, perhaps, in the future, not only the cable type of connection, but also Wi-Fi will not be needed. With the simplification of connecting to a mobile operator (and a step has already been taken in this direction, and this is an eSIM virtual SIM card), it is possible that devices will already connect to the mobile network independently without a wire and Wi-Fi.