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A Reality Check for DSL
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On the Internet, the last mile is only one of many, many miles.
Getting there can be half the problem and more. "The major
performance slowdowns occur in the Internet infrastructure,
primarily at the on-ramps, off-ramps and interconnection, or
switching, points between Internet providers where congestion
and packet loss frequently occur," a recent Keystone research
report concludes. Others have told me that the average Internet
transaction can be held up at about six points on the way from end
to end.
Let me put it another way: the Internet is a network of networks,
and your computer has to navigate through several "hops" to get
data back from the server of the Web site you want to see. You
have to get on your online service provider's network. Then you
have hop over to the network of the company that's hooking your
service provider into the Internet. Once on the Net, your request
bounces from way-station to way-station until it gets near the Web
server you're looking for. Then, it's another hop or two before
striking pay dirt, and an equally complicated trip home.
All these exchanges, from network to network, provide an
opportunity for network delays. Your request might move like a
speed demon from point B to point C, but if the network is busy
at point C, you might have to wait 10 seconds before proceeding
to point D.
This is just theory, of course, but Keystone isn't in the theory
business. It crunches actual network performance numbers, and its
readings on the Internet produced this startling number: traffic on
the Internet travels at an average speed of 40,000 bits per second
-- not the kind of pace that will satisfy a user expecting 1 million
bps.
And that's not the only bit of bad news Keynote is spreading
about the Net. Another study showed that the technical
performance of the Web "degraded," by 4.5% last summer.
Shklar blames it on the system: 47 different Internet backbone
providers trying to exist in harmony with more than 4,000 online
service providers. That's a lot of interconnection points between a
lot of networks, known as "peering" points, and a lot of room for
delays.
I asked a spokesman at my local phone company, Bell Atlantic,
about the problem and he conceded that the DSL lines the
company plans on selling this fall won't provide customers with a
steady 1 million bps connection. Bell Atlantic hasn't been specific
with its DSL plans -- it hasn't released pricing and it won't say
what communities will get the service first -- but spokesman Larry
Plumb said one thing's for sure: "It won't mean the full throughput,"
he said. "This is part of the educational process and preparations
we are doing now."
The company is also trying to educate the government. In January,
it petitioned the FCC for entry into the Internet backbone
business, so the company won't have to rely on others to carry its
data load between the 19 sub-regions it serves. "This is insufficient
investment in backbone capacity in the northeast and
mid-Atlantic," complained Edward D. Young III, senior vice
president and associate general counsel for the company. "It's
resulting in slower speeds for data transmission as the amount of
traffic increases."
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