ABSTRACT
The widespread adoption of the TCP/IP protocol suite by business, government, and academia has resulted in a significant amount of development effort being devoted to this protocol suite. This development effort recognizes that Internet usage has grown exponentially, from a few hundred thousand users at the beginning of the 1990s to over 100 million users at the beginning of the new millennium. With this vast market of Internet users, the acquisition of equipment by Internet service providers (ISPs) also became an extensive market for hardware and software developers. With the vast amount of funds that ISPs are expending in providing support to their customer base, they are also favorably viewing the development of new technologies that they could use for additional billing, enhancing customer retention, and differentiating their service from other ISPs. Thus, there is a receptive market from both end users and ISPs for the use of new technologies that add functionality to the TCP/IP protocol suite.
