THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607060239
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY ROGER A. GRIMES, SPECIAL TO BUSINESS WEEKLY
LENGTH: 191 lines
Just when everyone thought the Internet was ready to explode in popularity, some technology sages say the computer network appears ready to implode.
With everyone from school kids to corporate marketing executives using the Net's World Wide Web, no wonder information traveling along the global computer network often seems to crawl. It's a clear case of demand overwhelming the supply.
Most experts predict the system will adjust for the surge in popularity in time to accomodate the growing number of companies that want to do business on the Web, but a few computer sages warn the system seems imperiled.
``I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and catastrophically collapse in 1996,'' said Robert Metcalfe, co-founder of computer giant 3Com and inventor of the networking protocol Ethernet.
``I am quite certain the Web will die this year,'' asserted Mark Stahlman, president of New Media Associates, a New York media research and financial services firm.
They are not alone. InfoWorld, a magazine read by many computer professionals, polled readers and found 45 percent of the respondents agreed with this hypothesis: The Internet will fall in '96.
While not everyone expects a collapse, almost everyone in the Internet industry agrees: Prepare for growing pains.
``There are and will be brownouts,'' said Gordon Borrell, vice president of corporate development at Norfolk-based InfiNet, a national Internet service provider owned in part by Landmark Communications Inc., publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.
Internet brownouts occur when congestion or technical problems temporarily disrupts the flow of significant amounts of information on the network. That can impede companies that want to do business on the Net.
Almost everyone agrees growing pains are inevitable for rapidly growing systems, but Metcalfe takes the thought one step further. He said the Internet will succumb to its pains.
He said the Internet lacks the capacity to support its current use, much less its expansion.
Alhough the Internet is growing eightfold annually, he said, the size of the ``pipes'' is not growing at the same rate. When the Internet becomes congested, people can't get to the information they want as quickly as they want, if at all.
During the announcement of the O.J. Simpson trial outcome, the Internet had huge brownouts throughout the nation as online debates started.
The Atlanta Olympics (http://www.atlanta.olympic.org) is expected to cause much the same traffic problems as people head online to get event results.
Lynn Giuffre, a local systems analyst, says she often has friends over to her home to use the Internet. ``They're all excited,'' she said, ``and then they're surprised to see how slow it is and how you have to wait.''
Why the pipes are full has a simple explanation. The Internet was designed to send small amounts of data, like e-mail. Sound and video data, which is essential for the commercial success of the Internet, has only recently become commonplace on the Net.
That data can quickly clog the pipes. One minute of high-quality video is like moving more than 5,000 pages of typed text. In technical terms, that's up to 10 megabytes of disk space-hours of download time over the average modem. As a result, experienced Internet users know the Internet is full of ``hurry-up-and-wait'' periods.
This very slowness has cooled the enthusiasm of some corporate marketing executives who had counted on doing heavy business on the Web.
Frank Gens, senior vice president of research at International Data Corp., a leading provider of information technology research, predicts many companies will leave the Internet because of low profits on on-line advertising.
``Twenty percent of Fortune 500 companies will stabilize their investment or pull out of the Web this year,'' Gens said.
What's more, many consumers are wary in the wake of widely publicized security break-ins. Many companies also are wary. They won't send corporate secrets or do on-line business until stronger security is installed.
Although many Internet providers say security break-ins are rare, more than half the information security chiefs polled by the National Computer Security Association said they've experienced Net-related break-ins in the last year.
Netscape Communications, maker of the most popular web ``browser'' software, has had its algorithms for protecting secured transactions decoded at least twice.
Despite the problems, most technology watchers say the Internet will make only tiny market corrections this year. Even so, they insist the Internet can self-correct without self-destructing.
InfiNet's Borrell makes an analogy to the infancy of the car industry.
``Many people thought the automotive car was just a fad,'' Borrell said. ``They said there were not enough roads or gasoline stations to support the car. Obviously, they were wrong. If there is money involved - and there is lots of money in the Internet - it will be fixed.''
Several fixes are ready to be applied. MCI and Sprint, which provide more than half of the Internet's backbone support, this year both plan to triple bandwidth, which has the effect of expanding the pipes. Other researchers have documented evidence that not only is the Internet not slowing down, it is getting faster.
John S. Quarterman, senior technical partner at Texas Internet Consulting, studies Internet trends and figures it's faster than ever.
His company sends thousands of ``pings'' every four hours to more than 4,500 Internet sites around the world. By measuring how long it takes each ping to make a round trip, the company can make some scientific conclusions for its ``Internet weather report.''
While Quarterman found occasional traffic ``storms,'' more often the skies were clear. ``There is a decrease in latency and a decreased variation in latency,'' he said, meaning the Internet is getting faster and the number of traffic slowdowns is decreasing.
Keith Basil, vice president for iTRiBE, a Hampton Roads Internet-based facilitator of electronic commerce, foresees no real business impediments such as congestion or security break-ins. In fact, he predicts that Internet banking transactions will take off this year.
``Security will get stronger as the year progresses, and is already strong enough to start electronic commerce. The key is scalability,'' Basil said. ``Some of the people trying to provide Internet services are using small computers held together with spit and glue to serve thousands of users, instead of going with systems with a strong, scalable architecture.''
``We've been through several other Internet crises in the past, like running out of Internet addresses, or the router tables getting too big, and in every case, we addressed the problem. So, no, I don't see this as an unsolvable crisis that will lead to a meltdown,'' said George Strawn, division director for networking and communications research and infrastructure for the National Science Foundation, which helped start the Internet.
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says it more bluntly.
``There's not a chance in hell that the Internet will implode,'' he said. ``The Internet is an incredibly decentralized network that was designed to take a nuclear impact and still function. Not only will it not collapse, I predict that 1996 will be the year of digital cash. Even with all the hype, no one has a clue to how big the Internet will be on the Richter scale of our current expectations.''
With all the ``experts'' disagreeing, many companies are understandably confused.
The best advice anyone can take when considering to get involved with the Internet is to proceed carefully.
Know that there will be, at the very least, some problems and changes made to address them as the Internet continues to grow.
With companies like AT&T and Microsoft getting involved, it is unlikely that the Internet will be a passing fad, experts say. MEMO: How big is the Internet?
The Internet handles huge volumes of data. The backbone fiber optic
pipes can handle over 155 million bytes per second. That's like like
pushing every issue of the Wall Street Journal ever published to every
home in the nation and doing it in one second, says Nicholas Negroponte.
director of MIT's media lab.
Why is the Internet so slow?
The Internet is made up dozens of different components, and each
vendor (or service provider) can have a different range of services.
When you use your computer to hook up to the Internet and start
downloading a file from another site, a lot of components are involved.
Each piece of equipment can slow you down.
First, your PC and modem, even at the best of speeds, are relatively
slow compared to moving files from your hard drive to memory (where most
of us see computers working.)
The fastest modems are hundreds of times slower than the slowest hard
drives. The typical home modem transfers data at 3,600 characters per
second.
Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) probably has the most control
over the quality of service you receive.
The ISP usually pays for a certain speed data line from one of the
Internet backbone providers, such as MCI or Sprint.
Typically, a quality ISP buys at least T1 (a high-speed tele line
built for high-speed transmission of data, commonly 195,000 characters
per second) service from the backbone provider.
Larger ISP's buy several T1's. Smaller ISP's have don't even have the
speed of a T1 line.
Besides, the obvious rationing of lines between all of the ISP users
(that's you), the ISP must maintain a solid network environment to make
the fast speed available to the end user. Some buy a second T1 line in
case the first T1 goes down
Some Internet providers actually lease their backbone from their
larger competitor and re-sell it.
Third, the largest number of components fall in the Internet itself.
Made up of literally tens of thousands of routers (devices that route
your data to and from the correct destination), these ``traffic cops''
can be dealing with millions of data pockets at one time. If one goes
down, your data must take a longer route to reach its final destination.
It is here that the doomsayers say the Internet has its weakness.
These routers must constantly be maintained and upgraded to
accommodate the increasing Internet traffic.
Fourth, is the speed of the backbone ``pipes'' themselves. Most of
the Internet backbone is running at 45 million bits (8 bits to a byte)
per second.
Several backbone providers are moving to 155 million bits per second.
A few very experimental networks are moving to 622 million bits per
second, but it will be years before that type of bandwidth is available
to consumers.
Lastly, the place where most of the current congestion can be found,
is the ``host'' computer where you are trying to view data, such as a
Web site maintained by a catalog store. Some of these host computers
simply can't handle the thousands and in some cases millions of daily
requests for information. by CNB