April 1999

BY ROBERT VAHID HASHEMIAN

It happened during the Super Bowl. A 30-second commercial by Victoria's Secret promoting their Web site, and boom! The stampede was on. The glut was so bad that many couldn't even come close to the site. Now, I wouldn't be the one browsing on such a Web site (did I mention my wife occasionally peruses my column?) But word has it that the site is still off-limits or at least glacial at certain times of the day. We all remember the day Monica Lewinsky's testimony was released on the Web by Kenneth Starr's office. Or a number of days when online brokers were brought to their knees as the stock market set trade volume records last year. The Internet has withstood some hefty traffic punches, and although many pundits were predicting a disaster waiting in the Internet bandwidth wings, I would venture to say that the Internet has proven itself pretty resilient and trustworthy so far.

Before you take comfort in this fact and cuddle up to your PC for a little RealPlayer (www.real.com) action, open up for a dose of reality. Unless you are the ultimate Utopian optimist, you must know that there is a limit to everything. Sometimes these limits are beyond our expectations, but still - somewhere out there, they exist. An online bookstore's stock can't continue up at a breakneck speed forever, we can't pollute the air and water at an accelerated pace and expect nature to keep cleaning up (okay, I am a little green at heart), and even the Sun won't be around eternally. The same rule holds true for the Internet. We can't expect the Internet to continue carrying an ever-increasing load forever. Sooner or later, something has to give. I am actually not the one to predict apocalyptic disaster in the offing, but I think the repercussions will be spread among all of us in the form of slow and intermittent response times. Not an overly disastrous notion, but it will be irksome if you are trying to download a graphics-laden Web page. As normal Internet users, we have become accustomed to delays when we browse, patiently waiting for pages to download. After all - we have only been browsing for a few short years.

When it comes to Internet telephony, however, I worry about what the increase in load will mean in the future. Real-time telephone connections have been the norm for 80 years and we will accept nothing less than that. I think we all agree that Internet telephony, as a whole, has come a long way since the days when it was regarded as just a hard-to-reach dream. Today, voice over IP is not just a possibility, it is a reality happening all around us. One look at the hubbub surrounding the convergence industry and that should evaporate any skepticism.

But as we move forward to start realizing the dream of carrying voice (and everything else) over data lines, a little monster is beginning to rear its ugly head. You didn't think it was gonna be smooth, did you? By now, you must know that the metaphoric monster I am referring to is none other than the traffic that has begun to slowly grip the Internet by the throat - and there is no relief in sight. In fact those little digital packets are multiplying like rabbits, threatening to overwhelm the Net with their sheer numbers. Let's take a look at what the contributing factors are.

Streamers
Streaming technologies have been part of the Web scene for a while now, but as the battle between Microsoft's NetShow (www.microsoft.com) and RealNetworks' RealPlayer heated up last year, it drew a lot more attention to this enriching technology. Other players such as Apple's QuickTime (www.quicktime.com) have also been very active, attracting a respectable number of users. These days, many news and technology Web sites offer some kind of streaming service to visitors. From radio to television to footage snippets, you can find just about all of them online. Imagine my surprise when I found out about the Iranian radio and TV Web site broadcasting (or should I say webcasting) six radio frequencies and two television channels live from Tehran - all in exceptional quality.

Applications such as Microsoft's NetMeeting or White Pine's CU-SeeMe (www.cuseeme.com) allow us to visually communicate to others, but with each connection the bandwidth is squeezed just a little more. On the shadier side of things, the sex industry has also been an immense contributor to the traffic jam. Something we all have to contend with as long as humans are humans.

Plug-ins
The plug-in concept has been with us pretty much as long as browsers have. They are meant to enhance the browser's capability by giving it the ability to comprehend formats in addition to .HTML, .GIF, or Java applets. But the side effect is that normally plug-ins handle bulky files. Take Adobe Acrobat's .PDF format (www.adobe.com). The .PDF documents almost always look extensively better than their .HTML counterparts, but the penalty is large .PDF file sizes compared to their .HTML versions. Newer versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer can handle most MS Office formats such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint - all of which have inflated file sizes. Same goes for Macromedia's Shockwave (www.shockwave.com), which has become a popular choice to enliven Web pages.

VPNs
Virtual Private Networks are perhaps one of the hottest topics in the computer and networking industry today. They allow remote users to connect to the corporate LAN from anywhere an ISP can reach. Sure, at this point many of them are deployed over managed/private networks, but soon there will a proliferation of VPNs and we will see them seep into the public Internet in a big way. VPNs are notorious bandwidth hogs, and since users are given the perception of being on the LAN, they will mercilessly move and copy large amounts of data with abandon.

The e-commerce effect
No matter where on the Web you look (including our own beloved Web site - www.tmcnet.com), you are bound to bump into one of those cute little shopping carts inviting you to fill it up and check out. The online catalog and commerce business is in full swing and making browsers out of those you swore would never touch a computer. Basically, the impetus to go online and explore is greater than ever and it gets harder every day to resist.

Cable and DSL
Leap-frogging ISDN, these relatively new and inexpensive technologies are being adopted in the United States and other countries at a rapid pace, and users are flocking to them as the 56K analog connection has begun to lose its luster and can no longer satisfy users' voracious digital appetites. T1 and frame relay services are also gaining rapid popularity as many small businesses find themselves cramped in their lower speed connections.

These were, of course, just a sample of some of the culprits in the bandwidth free-for-all. Other statistics are downright scary. According to Merrill Lynch, 95 percent of U.S. homes will be online by 2004. This is an astonishing piece of data, given that today only 40 percent of U.S. households are wired. And according to Forrester Research, a quarter of all online homes will be on some form of high-speed connection by 2002. This is also cause for concern as my guess is this number is in the 1-2 percent range today. And finally, by some accounts, the bandwidth consumption for the Internet doubles every 100 days. Voice traffic also doubles on telephone networks - over a period of 12 years!

And here comes Internet telephony, which not only expects the network to handle extra voice and video traffic, but demands real-time delivery no matter where or when. We comfort ourselves in the knowledge that standards are being developed to address the connection issues, signaling issues, and QoS (Quality of Service) issues. Can the Internet really handle all this?

Surprisingly, the answer is yes. As we go about promoting Internet telephony, backbone companies are gearing up to tackle the bandwidth glut of tomorrow. Internet2 is just an example of this. It is a 13,000-mile, 2.5-Gbps network connecting 140 universities and companies, for use as a testing ground for multimedia, security, differentiated service levels, IPV6, and a host of other applications that we will need to make convergence a graceful reality. The list of participating companies reads like a who's who in the networking industry - Cisco (www.cisco.com), Lucent (www.lucent.com), Nortel (www.nortelnetworks.com), MCI WorldCom (www.mci.com), AT&T (www.att.com), IBM (www.ibm.com), Qwest (www.qwest.com), and many others. Internet2, rife with fiber and multi-gigabit switches, went online in February.

No, I am not worried about the backbone, but I am worried about you and I. Take a look at your company's current network and ask yourself honestly: Can I move my company's voice network over to my data network, cut all my phone lines, and sleep well at night? I suspect that many companies are still on worn-out 10 Mbps networks and never found it necessary to upgrade. Check the NICs, the routers, the hubs, and the cables, and start preparing your network for convergence. It will be here sooner than you think. The backbone is going on Viagra and your LAN should be too.

Robert Vahid Hashemian provides us with a healthy dose of reality every month in his Reality Check column. Robert currently holds the position of Webmaster for TMCnet - your online resource for CTI, Internet telephony, and call center solutions. He can be reached at rhashemian@tmcnet.com.