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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Walter C. who wrote (1465)	10/7/1998 12:53:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Hi Walter, re: Turnpikes and Corridors... >>Could you give me a brief tutorial on the "turnpike" and "corridor" effect?<< Sure, be happy to give it a shot... These are two principles that are not necessarily a part of formal engineering or Ph.D. work (although some very intersting papers have been written about them, so I suppose that they actually are, by now), but are understood by every planner who ever thought for a moment that they had planned sufficient capacity in a network, only to face the chagrin and embarrassment of being off the mark - sometimes by orders of magnitude. The Turnpike effect refers to the inevitable exhaust of capacity (lanes) on a network (highway) that takes place, anytime a new path (highway or turnpike) is built between any two points worth traveling. Or at least that was how it was once perceived. Today, that "worth traveling" is an unknown, and new value propositions are only now becoming obvious, although building in to the unknown for its own sake could be considered ratherr risky. Maybe someone else can expand on this part? I'm late for a meeting. <g> Some descriptions of this phenomenon: ...wherein, if you build it, more and more will come; ...wherein, communications jams are caused by heavy data traffic and bottlenecks in the various systems through which the data is routed. When all that data gets jammed and comes to a screeching halt, it's said to be due to the turnpike effect. ...wherein users' demands on a system or network increase as they become familiar and comfortable with the tools it offers them; ...wherein even a well-thought-out and capacity-planned infrastructure quickly becomes overwhelmed when it is made available to the public; ...wherein you thought that you built enough capacity, but the applications became so appealing and affordable for users to employ, that, in a very short time it becomes apparent that you actully didn't {build enough capacity}. The last of these is the hope that VoIP pundits hold out for its eventual ubiquity. Other, less often used connotations and implications of the turnpike effect are the resulting effects of the turnpike being in place, such as the opening up of new towns, industrial centers, and social gathering points which cause a kind of coagulation in otherwise vacant or unused space (NAPS, exchanges, etc.) The Corridor Effect is a takeoff on this principle that states that for every time you walk through a door (access a web site, for example), it leads to a corridor (HTML) that has a dozen or so doors (links) in it, and each of those doors leads to another corridor that leads to more doors, until you suddenly realize that the more you search, the more options exist to explore, with ever more traffic beging generated as a result... you get the idea. HTH, and Best Regards, Frank Coluccio