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by Rob Gebeloff
A Reality Check for DSL
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And this is just the low-tech East Coast. Out there in the land of
sun and Silicon, the problem is undoubtedly worse. The trade
journal High Performance Computing reported last December that
congestion on the Internet's West Coast hub had become so
severe that some Internet traffic just fizzles up and dies. "Most end
users don't realize it," the journal quoted San Francisco-based
consultant Gary Clem, "but at peak loads, many data packets
simply go bye-bye."
There are solutions, of course, but they involve money, and here's
where the nightmare comes in. Some believe the only answer is
metering. Metering means that users would pay different rates for
different levels of service. If you absolutely, positively have to get
your e-mail through instantly, you might pay an extra $10 a month
for "express" Internet service. Your data packets would then be
given priority at various clog points throughout the Net.
Those of us who refuse to fork over the extra $10 a month will
have to wait. Or, worse, risk seeing our e-mail go "bye-bye."
My favorite solution, and one widely used by the cable industry, is
site caching. When one user visits a Web site on the net, a copy is
made and deposited in the memory of a computer dedicated to
serving users in a small geographic area. When a second user in
that area calls up the same site, the computer checks to see if
there's a newer version of the page. If not, it delivers the second
user the Web site directly from memory, bypassing the Internet
altogether. Plumb hinted that Bell Atlantic is considering caching
for its DSL roll-out.
But this is more of a gimmick than a solution. The ultimate solver
would be to upgrade the Internet's infrastructure. And while this
will happen eventually, the warnings are out already: Your new
DSL won't be as fast as you think.
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