[No need for bandwidth, eh????]
Didn't someone comment there was little demand for bandwidth???? Hmmm. . . here's some food for thought:
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WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 15 1997
By Nicholas Denton
It is as if cinema goers had to descend in their millions or billions on Hollywood itself to see the latest dinosaur offering from Steven Spielberg. This unflattering metaphor applies, surprisingly, to the internet, supposedly that most modern of networks.
The problem is that the internet, designed as a means of exchanging electronic mail and documents between individuals, is increasingly used to deliver news and entertainment to a mass audience, and the design of the network has not yet adapted to this new role.
David Peterschmidt, chief executive of Inktomi, a developer of software designed to make the internet more efficient, estimates that up to 60 per cent of traffic is redundant. "Our networks are incredibly dumb, moving the same data again and again," he says.
So, how to make them smarter? One increasingly popular response among
software companies and service providers is to borrow from the structure and communications channels of the very medium the internet is challenging - broadcasting.
A solution is pressing. Demand for high-bandwidth capacity is outpacing supply: already, the waiting time for cross-country DS-3 connections, a high-speed link which would allow, for instance, a Seattle-based web site to distribute its content to New York, has stretched from six weeks to nine months.
Moreover, the growing complexity of the internet, which consists of many networks knitted together, means some requests for pages are taking as long as five seconds and making as many as 50 hops between a user's computer and a site, say the publishers of ESPN SportsZone.
And as graphics, audio and video become more common on the web, traffic on the internet backbone, the high-speed connections which bind together the network, is doubling every 100 days, according to UUNet Technologies, one of the largest internet service providers.
A further flood of demand is coming. Cable companies, through ventures such as @Home Network, and telecoms companies, through the installation of xDSL technology, are beginning to roll out services offering access at speeds at least 25 times that of the most advanced modems available on ordinary lines today.
To be sure, hardware makers are responding. A technology called wave division multiplexing from Ciena will squeeze 16 times more data on a strand of fibre optic cable. And a gigabit sonic router from Cisco Systems, the networking giant, promises higher capacity at the points at which traffic is directed, for instance.
However, raw acceleration of the backbone is not the whole answer. For a start, the speed of the fastest network is constrained by the rate at which data can travel over the most sluggish network or metropolitan access exchanage type of traffic hub, on its path.
Second, supply inspires demand. "With every generation of data technology, we think there is unlimited bandwidth," says Steve Perlman, chief executive of WebTV, the Microsoft-owned developer of set-top boxes for internet access. "There never is. We always find something to do with it."
As long as bandwidth has some cost, it makes sense to economise on its use, by minimising the number of identical copies of data being sent over the same routes. The trick, to send a piece of information just once to many recipients, is much like broadcasting. The notion has inspired a range of new services and technologies.
Digital distribution. It is a stretch to use the term broadcasting, but these services from companies such as GlobalCenter improve the performance of an internet publisher's web site by automatically replicating the content in regional data centres closer to users.
"Why does a user have to traverse the continent to get content - why not bring the content to the user?" asks Douglas Hickey, chief executive of GlobalCenter. The company, which has six regional centres including one in London, estimates an improvement of 20-30 per cent in the response time experienced by site visitors.
Smart caching. Regional internet service providers often keep a copy of popular web sites such as Netscape's on their own servers to improve download times, but new software from Inktomi promises much more flexible use of this technique.
Among other things, Inktomi software allows publishers to monitor even on a cache in another country how often their content is accessed, so that they maximise their advertising revenues. One study by the company showed that a cached copy, compared to the original site, could be accessed 20 times as quickly.
Intelligent networks. @Home Network, the venture which uses the networks of allied cable companies to provide high-speed internet
access, distributes data to the server computers which reside at its 55 cable head-end locations only a few miles from most users.
"Computers and storage are getting much cheaper and faster more rapidly than telecoms capacity," says Milo Medin, vice-president of network for @Home, explaining his decision to distribute content close to users.
Multicasting. @Home, MCI and UUNet have all recently announced
services which adapt the internet to make it more like a broadcasting
medium. A network router configured for the technology, which is
known as multicasting, takes a single copy of a web page or an audio
stream, duplicates it and then distributes it to users.
Internet broadcasting. Some companies are taking internet broadcasting
one step further: rather than adapt the internet to make it more like a broadcasting channel, they are using existing satellite and terrestrial broadcast signals to distribute internet content simultaneously to many users.
WebTV devices, and PCs using technology from WavePhore built into
Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 98 operating system, will be able to
download internet content embedded in television signals. "What we have done is to make the disk (the WebTV device's 1.1GB hard drive) the last stage of caching," says Mr Perlman.
Broadcasting has its limitations. The primary objection is that the popularity of the internet is rooted in interactivity. "The caching idea works well if there is just text and images, but no interaction," says Vinton Cerf, an MCI executive regarded as one of the originators of the internet. "It may turn out to be cheaper to do a central database and use up bandwidth than it is to try to distribute the database and keep everyone updated."
At the very least, nevertheless, internet broadcasting, in all its forms, should help the network distribute the mass entertainment content which is migrating from traditional media to the new channel. And that, in turn, will free it for the interactive applications, such as online chat, which are unique to it.>>> |
