November 24, 1997
Internet backbone performance blunts impact of high-bandwidth tools
By Bob O'Donnell
Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. That's the battle cry of today's Internet users and
content providers. Everybody who's doing anything with the Web is hungry for faster data
throughput, whether they're surfing for content from their office or home or providing
content for others to use.
Not surprisingly, the computer and telecommunications industries are responding to that
need and starting to provide more high-bandwidth solutions, both for consumers and
producers of Web content. High-speed end-user access solutions -- both for businesses and
individuals -- in particular, are seeing a great deal of development. Cable modems and
satellite linkups are starting to appear on retail store shelves and VAR price lists as
demands for higher bandwidth solutions increase. At last week's Comdex convention, for
example, 3Com was demonstrating cable
modems that they plan to offer as a retail product.
Phone companies and other service providers are finally starting to offer lower-cost,
high-speed data lines as well. Here in Northern California, for example, Pacific Bell
recently introduced ADSL service for large portions of the Bay Area. Claiming data rates
of 384 Kbps for its lower-speed connections and 1.5 Mbps for the more expensive
higher-speed, Pac Bell's Fast Trak DSL
service certainly sounds promising.
The problem is, despite well-publicized efforts by many telecom companies to increase
the size of the pipes used across large sections of the Internet's backbone, the overall
throughput on the 'net for typical Web content is still abysmal. According to a study
recently released by Keynote Systems, the average
data transfer rate from one point on the net to another is only about 40 Kbps (no, that's
not a typo). The rates can vary considerably, depending upon where you are in the country
and what backbone the data travels over, but the overall average of 3.6 million
measurements comes out to a mere 40Kbps. Interestingly, this rate is about 4.5 percent
slower than the rate Keynote found in its first study of Internet backbone performance
(which I wrote about in a previous column.)
So, giving yourself or your business a larger "straw" through which you can
suck down Internet data probably won't provide the performance improvement you expect -- a
rather sobering thought. Dedicated connections certainly benefit from higher bandwidth
pipes, as do FTP sessions and downloading streaming audio/video, which essentially work
like FTP connections. But random surfing around the net to HTML-based Web sites really
doesn't. (By the way, this explains why all the demos for these high-speed devices tend to
show how fast-streaming video or some other high-demand connection is -- ask to try normal
Web surfing and it won't be anywhere near as impressive.) Given that the vast majority of
users tend to use the 'net for normal Web surfing the vast majority of the time, this is a
big problem.
The reason this situation exists (and why it won't be fixed anytime soon) is because of
the circuitous routes that data blocks take as they travel over the 'net. Think of it in
terms of a traffic analogy. Just because there's a new 12-lane highway -- the analog
equivalent to the enormous OC-6 and OC-12 lines some Internet backbone providers are
installing -- doesn't mean you can get to one place faster than you could when there was
only a four-lane highway there. Sure, you'll travel more easily on the segment of your
trip that includes the 12-lane freeway, but the various smaller routes that you use to get
to and from the highway still have an inordinately large role in determining how long the
trip takes. The 'net's problems continue to be the hand-off points between networks -- the
numerous on-ramps and off-ramps that packets of data encounter in their trip across the
Internet. If you ever spent any time on LA's ever-expanding yet constantly full freeway
system, you'll understand what I mean.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to this situation. And in practical terms,
that means I'd think twice before investing in any high-speed access solutions. As
frustrating as it may be, it appears that many of our slower solutions are going to have
to do for some time.
©
Copyright 1997, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
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