Vint Cerf says three billion users could be online by 2010

The pervasiveness of web-enabled devices will triple the number of worldwide internet users from one to three billion by 2010, according to one of Google’s top executives.

Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist for the search giant, and widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of the internet, says there are some two and a half billion mobile devices around the world, many of which are networked.

‘One thing that will dramatically increase the likely number of internet users is the prevalence of mobiles that are internet-enabled,’ he told Computing.

‘My guess is that we may have three billion internet users by 2010, so that’s a tripling of users in the next four years.’

Cerf expects third parties to increasingly offer services to help users manage and interact with networked appliances, and says there will eventually be more devices connected to the internet than there are people.

‘The field of managing networks and devices is almost unlimited and some of us think there may be 100 devices per person on the net in the long term,’ he said.

Cerf estimates there could eventually be as many as 600 billion devices linked to the web.

‘Before you think that’s crazy, think about the number of programmable devices capable of some sort of computation: then ask how many there are surrounding you in the office or at home – it’s amazing,’ he said.

‘It’s not a big leap to get from where we are now to things that are web-enabled.’
Cerf believes that web-enabled devices pose a challenge for companies such as Google.

‘We have to adapt applications to work in a smaller display area and we might also have to work with voice interaction,’ he said.