Even if it seems like a kind of joke, similar to the one about the end of the Iinternet since the beginning of the 2000s, the statement that "Internet is timed out” belongs to one of those who founded it half a century ago.

Lawrence Roberts, the founder ARPANET, declared in an article of his that the current system consisting of data packets it does not correspond to the requirements of some modern applications (voce and video) used more and more by the very large number of users that the Internet currently has and that it can barely cope with this situation.

The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it. In 1967, I wrote the first plan for the ancestor of today’s Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, and then led the team that designed and built it. The main idea was to share the available network infrastructure by sending data as small, independent packets, which, though they might arrive at different times, would still generally make it to their destinations. The small computers that directed the data traffic—I called them Interface Message Processors, or IMPs—evolved into today’s routers, and for a long time they’ve kept up with the Net’s phenomenal growth. Until now.

The solution proposed by Roberts is complete re-use of the system of networks with a new type of routers to transport the information in continuously, without interruptions, to eliminate very long delays between data packets and errors caused by the loss of such packets.

The upshot is that directing traffic in terms of flows rather than individual packets improves the utilization of networks. By eliminating the excessive delays and random packet losses typical of traditional routers, flow management fills communication links with more data and protects voice and video streams. And it does all that without requiring changes to the time-tested TCP/IP protocol.

You can find more details about how the Internet can be "saved" in the near future here.