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Technology Stocks : PairGain Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Graham Dellaire who wrote (21029)	2/25/1998 8:02:00 PM
From: ENOTS	Respond to of 36349

pg 2 A Reality Check for DSL 1 \| page 2 \| 3 \| 4 So this new super pipe, to be available by Christmas, was what got my bandwidth dream going again. (It first hit me the night after I tried my first cable modem session last spring). But now Keynote comes along with this message for the online world: Not so fast with that DSL hype. The problem, Shklar explained to me, is that the Internet itself simply can't support a world where all of its users are demanding 1 megabit of data per second. "I don't think we'll ever be able to push a button and get the content we want at the maximum speed supported by the pipe coming into our house," he says. "It will be faster than today, of course, but people shouldn't buy a 1 megabit pipe thinking that's the performance they're going to see while surfing the Internet." Essentially, digital subscriber lines and cable modem set-ups are "last mile" solutions, in that they speed the connection up from the home to the nearest phone/cable company office. And solving the "last mile problem" by creating an affordable but super-fast connection into the home has been on top of everyone's agenda for a long time. If you've ever driven into Manhattan, you've likely encountered your own version of the last mile problem. The other night, I had a dinner engagement in the city but was running late. The highway gods were with me, however, and I made it into Manhattan in about 30 minutes, putting me right back on schedule. But then I hit the last mile problem: Manhattan's side streets and byways are so narrow and congested, it took me another 20 minutes just to drive the final 15 blocks to the restaurant. "So this is w hat it's like to be data coming in from the Internet," I told my wife. She looked at me funny. Now, digital subscriber lines and cable modems are supposed to solve this last mile problem, running the highway all the way from the Interstate to the restaurant's door. And at first glance, the Internet seems pretty well prepared to handle the challenge of providing this end-to-end warp speed. The last time I looked, the Internet comprised a series of "trunk" lines capable of carrying 45 million bits of information a second. And Internet data has literally tens of thousands of these pipes to choose from when it tries to make its way from your computer to the Web site you clicked on and back. But of course, those pipes have to carry your request and everything else everyone else is doing. The Net already seems clogged with all the pictures, sounds, real-time video broadcasts, e-mail, and software downloads. That means your request has to share the ride, and that means a big slowdown, particularly if your next door neighbor's teen-age son is sending a pirated version of NBA Slam '98 to his e-buddy in Budapest. 1 \| page 2 \| 3 \| 4

To: Graham Dellaire who wrote (21029)	2/25/1998 8:04:00 PM
From: ENOTS	Respond to of 36349

pg 3 A Reality Check for DSL 1 \| 2 \| page 3 \| 4 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." 1 \| 2 \| page 3 \| 4

To: Graham Dellaire who wrote (21029)	2/25/1998 8:06:00 PM
From: ENOTS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36349

pg 4 by Rob Gebeloff A Reality Check for DSL 1 \| 2 \| 3 \| page 4 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. #### End of Story