Hello Pruguy,
> can someone please explain how "net congestion" can be fixed and
> whose responsibility it would be to fix it?
Hmmm ... fun question. There are a couple of ways that companies are trying to "fix" this potential problem ... a) make the Internet "pipes" bigger, or b) make better use of the "pipes" that we have.
None of this is investment advice of any kind ... simply one person's perspective of inevitable technologies ...
So if you look at the people making "pipes", everything is moving to high-speed fiber optics. (This is why I bought Corning ... the maker of the glass ... and have been eyeing UniPhase ... the maker of the lasers)
The Internet infrastructure is being massively re-developed by companies like Qwest and Level 3 (both of who I also bought) who are laying conduit along the major railroad right-of-ways that can hold from 2 to 8+ fiber optic trunks. Each of these trunks can have up to 96 fiber, each carrying 10 Gigabits+ of Internet traffic. These are the people who are going to open up the major cross-country links. Then there is the Oxygen Project and Global Crossing who are attacking the undersea cables ... replacing them with huge fiber trunks.
Then, the local phone companies are all scrambling to install various flavors of DSL (Cisco, PairGain, etc.) equipment, which provides higher speed access to homes over the copper pairs of phone wires that you already have. But out in left field you have AT&T with the newly aquired TCI bringing cable modems (Cisco, ???) to millions of households and businesses. I meant to buy AT&T a couple of weeks ago ... I need to get in soon!
All of this relates to making the Internet "pipes" bigger ...
Then you have the other technologies which are starting to emerge. One of them is what is called "proxy/caching" which is the use of intelligent devices in the network itself which will store a copy of commonly accessed Internet content so that clients don't have to go all the way to the origin web server. These are also being installed in the Internet by the same people who own the networks ... but can be installed by corporatations and even small businesses and home users ... and they will be. People like Inktomi make these devices, although from a biased perspective I have to say that this is one of the areas that Novell has no real competition.
So, overall, it is the ISPs "responsibility" ... and new ISPs "responsibility" to "fix" the net congestion problem. Also, the software vendors need to ensure that the web pages and streaming media are "cachable" so that these new proxy/cache technologies can help to reduce redundant traffic.
Scott C. Lemon |
