Internet in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has been involved with the Internet throughout its origins and development. The telecommunications infrastructure in the United Kingdom provides Internet access to homes and businesses mainly through fibre, cable, mobile and fixed wireless networks.
The share of households with Internet access in the United Kingdom grew from 9 percent in 1998 to 93 percent in 2019. In 2019, virtually all adults aged 16 to 44 years in the UK were recent internet users, compared with 47% of adults aged 75 years and over; in aggregate, the third-highest in Europe. Internet bandwidth per Internet user was the seventh highest in the world in 2016, and average and peak internet connection speeds were top-quartile in 2017. Internet use in the United Kingdom doubled in 2020.
According to the Office of National Statistics and the Government of the United Kingdom's Culture, Media & Sport and Science, Innovation & Technology departments, the digital sector was worth more than £140 billion to the UK's economy per year, as of 2020. Research by Adobe suggested the UK spent £110.6 billion online in 2022.
The Internet top-level domain name specific to the UK is.uk, which is operated by Nominet. Four additional domains were introduced by ICANN for locations within the UK in 2014:.cymru and.wales for Wales,.scot for Scotland, and.london for London.
Early years
The UK has been involved in the research and development of packet switching, communication protocols, and internetworking since their origins. The development of these technologies was international from the beginning. While the research and development that led to the Internet protocol suite was driven and funded by the United States, it also involved and applied the work of British researchers. In particular, Donald Davies independently invented and pioneered the implementation of packet switching and associated communication protocols and computer network design at the National Physical Laboratory starting in 1965, which was incorporated into the design of the ARPANET in the United States; internetworking was pioneered by Peter Kirstein at University College London beginning in 1973 and he and his team at UCL participated in the Internet Experiment Notes work to design TCP/IP ; and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN in Switzerland.Precursors
Britain pioneered research and development of computers in the 1940s. This led to partnerships between the public and private sectors, which brought about sharing of concepts and the transfer of personnel between industry and academia or national research bodies. The trackball was invented in 1946 by Ralph Benjamin, while working for the Royal Navy Scientific Service. At the National Physical Laboratory, Alan Turing worked on computer design, assisted by Donald Davies in 1947.Christopher Strachey, who became Oxford University's first professor of computation, filed a patent application for time-sharing in 1959. In June that year, he gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at the UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider who worked on Project MAC at MIT in the United States.
Packet switching and national data network proposal
After meeting with Licklider in 1965, Donald Davies conceived the idea of packet switching for data communication. He proposed a commercial national data network and developed plans to implement the concept in a local area network, the NPL network, which operated from 1969 to 1986. He and his team including Derek Barber and Roger Scantlebury developed the concept of communication protocols for the network and carried out work to simulate the performance of a wide-area packet-switched network capable of providing data communications facilities to most of the U.K. Following the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, their research and practice was adopted by the ARPANET in the United States and influenced other researchers in Europe, including Louis Pouzin, and in Japan.The early Internet and TCP/IP
Donald Davies, Derek Barber and Roger Scantlebury joined the International Network Working Group in 1972 along with researchers from the United States and France. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn acknowledged Davies and Scantlebury in their seminal 1974 paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication".Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London was one of only two international connections on the ARPANET, alongside Norway. Beginning in 1973, UCL provided a gateway between the ARPANET and British academic networks, the first international internetwork for computer resource sharing. In 1975, 40 British academic research groups were using the link; by 1984, there was a user population of about 150 people on both sides of the Atlantic.
The specification of the Transmission Control Program was developed in the U.S. in 1974 through research funded and led by DARPA and Stanford University. The following year, testing began with concurrent implementations at University College London, Stanford University, and BBN. UCL played a significant role in the very earliest work recorded in the IEN. Adrian Stokes and Sylvia Wilbur, among others at UCL, programmed the computer used as the local node for the network at UCL and were "probably one of the first people in this country ever to send an email, back in 1974". Kirstein co-authored with Vint Cerf one of the most significant early technical papers on the internetworking concept in 1978. Further work was done by researchers at the Information Sciences Institute, at the University of Southern California. Kirstein's research group at UCL adopted TCP/IP in November 1982, ahead of ARPANET.
The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment became involved in implementation and testing of TCP/IP in 1976. The first email sent by a head of state was sent from the RSRE by Queen Elizabeth II to inaugurate the link to the ARPANET in March that year. RSRE was allocated class A Internet address range 25 in 1979, which later became the Ministry of Defence address space, providing 16.7 million IPv4 addresses.
Roger Camrass, with his supervisor, Robert Gallager, at MIT, showed packet switching to be optimal in the Huffman coding sense in 1978.
Derek Barber was involved in Internet design discussions in 1980. British researchers expressed a desire to use a country designation when American researchers Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris were designing the Domain Name System in 1984. Postel adopted this idea for the DNS, which used the ISO standard country abbreviations except for following the "UK" convention already in use in the UK's Name Registration Scheme, rather than the ISO-standard "GB". The.uk Internet country code top-level domain was registered in July 1985, seven months after the original generic top-level domains such as.com and the first country code after.us. At the time, ccTLDs were delegated by Postel to a "responsible person" and Andrew McDowell at UCL managed.uk, the first country code delegation. He later passed it to Dr Willie Black at the UK Education and Research Networking Association. Black managed the "Naming Committee" until he and John Carey formed Nominet UK in 1996. As one of the first professional ccTLD operators, it became the model for many other operators worldwide.
The UK's national research and education network, JANET connected with the National Science Foundation Network in the United States in 1989. JANET adopted Internet Protocol on its existing network in 1991. In the same year, Dai Davies introduced Internet technology into the pan-European NREN, EuropaNet.
British Telecom operated research labs which began, unofficially, relaying its internal email to the Internet at the end of the 1980s.
NetNames, Ivan Pope's company, developed the concept of a standalone commercial domain name registrar, which would sell domain registration and other associated services to the public. Network Solutions Inc., the domain name registry for the.com,.net, and.org top-level domains, assimilated this model, which ultimately led to the separation of registry and registrar functions.
Jon Crowcroft and Mark Handley received multiple awards for their work on Internet technology in the 1990s and 2000s. Karen Banks promoted the use of the Internet to empower women around the world.
Over the period 1980 to 2000, BT and other providers adopted TCP/IP and Internet product strategies when it became commercially advantageous.
Other computer networks and protocols
The South West Universities Computer Network was an early British academic computer network developed with the objective of resource sharing. After planning began in 1967, work was initiated in 1969 on an experimental network, becoming operational for users in 1974. In the early 1970s, the Science Research Council community established SRCnet, later called SERCnet. Other regional academic networks were built in the mid-late 1970s, as well as experimental networks such as the Cambridge Ring.During the 1970s, the NPL team researched internetworking on the European Informatics Network. Based on datagrams, the network linked Euratom, the French research centre INRIA and the UK's National Physical Laboratory in 1976. The transport protocol of the EIN helped to launch the INWG and X.25 protocols.
Building on the work of James H. Ellis in the late 1960s, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson invented a public-key cryptography algorithm in 1973. An equivalent algorithm was later independently invented in 1977 in the United States by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. The RSA algorithm became central to security on the Internet.
Post Office Telecommunications developed an experimental public packet switching network, EPSS, in the 1970s. This was one of the first public data networks in the world when it began operating in 1976. EPSS was replaced with the Packet Switch Stream in 1980. PSS connected to the International Packet Switched Service, which was created in 1978 through a collaboration between Post Office Telecommunications and two US telecoms companies. IPSS provided worldwide networking infrastructure.
British research contributed to the development of the X.25 standard agreed by the CCITT in 1976 which was deployed on PSS and IPSS. The UK academic community defined the Coloured Book protocols, which came into use as "interim" X.25 standards. These protocols gained some acceptance internationally as the first complete X.25 standard, and gave the UK "several years lead over other countries".
Logica, together with the French company SESA, set up a joint venture in 1975 to undertake the Euronet development, using X.25 protocols to form virtual circuits. It established a network linking a number of European countries in 1979 before being handed over to national PTTs In 1984.
Peter Collinson brought Unix to the University of Kent in 1976 and set up a UUCP test service to Bell Labs in the U.S. in 1979. The first UUCP emails from the U.S. arrived in the UK later that year and email to Europe started in 1980, becoming a regular service via EUnet in 1982. UKC provided the first connections to non-academic users in the early 1980s. Several companies established electronic mail services in Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s, enabling subscribers to send email either internally within a company network or over telephone connections or data networks such as Packet Switch Stream.
In the early 1980s, British academic networks started a standardisation and interconnection effort based on X.25 and the Coloured Book protocols. Known as the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association, and later JNT Association, this became JANET, the UK's national research and education network. JANET linked all universities, higher education establishments, and publicly funded research laboratories. It began operation in 1984, two years ahead of the NSFNET in the United States and was the fastest X.25 network in the world.
The National Computing Centre 1976 publication 'Why Distributed Computing' which came from considerable research into future configurations for computer systems, resulted in the UK presenting the case for an international standards committee to cover this area at the ISO meeting in Sydney in March 1977. This international effort ultimately led to the OSI model as an international reference model, published in 1984. For a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks.
Public dialup information, messaging and e-commerce services, were pioneered through the Prestel services developed by Post Office Telecommunications in 1979.
Commercial networking services between the UK and the US were being developed in late 1990.