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Riding the wild surf

Will the Internet ever live up to our expectations?

By Pradnya Joshi of the Journal Sentinel staff

October 7, 1996

The Internet is faster than it has ever been.

But that may miss the point.

There also are more delays than ever as thousands of new users a day turn to this relic of the Cold War for information.

With Internet use increasing exponentially, the inevitable growing pains are prompting technical upgrades that may relieve its clogged arteries. But newer, better technology also will enable more users to move heavier loads over the information highway. And that will result in a new set of potholes.

A minority of Internet experts predict that the road will crumble under the weight of the users.

"It's collapsing increasingly and a big collapse is ahead," maybe as soon as the end of this year, says Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com Corp. and inventor of Ethernet, the local area network used to connect computers and other equipment.

"What it needs most of all is operational management and, after that, it needs a more sophisticated understanding of money," Metcalfe said.

Others see this view as nothing more than a modern fable.

"They're still playing Chicken Little," said Fred Baker, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force of the non-profit Internet Society.

While it's true that the Internet has a lot more traffic, it also is true that it has a lot more network computers handling that traffic.

"We've got more demand but we've got more capacity," Baker said.

To understand the Internet and its problems, you need to understand its history, said Mark Hidalgo, group manager of IP Services for Sprint, the company whose systems handle 40% of the domestic and 60% of the global Internet traffic.

The Internet was designed in the 1960s as a communications tool for the U.S. Defense Department.

The department wanted a network that was dispersed throughout the country and could survive nuclear attack. The first parts of the network were put in place in 1969.

"The (Internet Protocol) was designed to be survivable," Hidalgo said. "Data would be able to heal itself and route around (problems)."

By the 1970s, the network had evolved into a tool for researchers and universities.

In the mid-1980s, the military split off part of its network to the National Science Foundation.

Even then, the Internet was designed to share information and messages, not to handle the large quantities of graphics and video now moving along the network.

"A picture might be worth a 1,000 words, but it could be worth a million words in bandwidth," said Dennis Fazio, executive director of Minnesota Regional Network, an independent Internet service provider in Minneapolis.

The advent of the World Wide Web, easy-to-use browsers and other developments in the early 1990s further commercialized the network.

In late 1994, the overburdened NSFNet backbone -- the nationwide pipes through which almost all Internet traffic flows -- was turned over to commercial companies.

Today, a handful of companies run the backbone. About 90% of the traffic travels through the parts run by MCI, Sprint, MFS Communications and ANS, now owned by America Online, Fazio said. BBN Planet, which is part of AT&T, also runs a portion of the backbone.

Now that the Internet is more or less a commercial entity, there is more pressure to solve the bottlenecks and traffic jams.

One of the most common problems are non-responsive Web sites or slow response times. That usually has more to do with the site than the Internet, said Tim Chase, co-founder and network operations director at Milwaukee-based Alpha Dot Net, which provides high-speed connections to the Internet.

The computers (called servers) that host many Web sites simply aren't able to handle increased traffic as the site becomes popular.

"There are many people who judge that the 'Internet is slow' based on the performance of a Web server," said Alec Ellsworth, president of Wauwatosa-based Internet Connect, a provider of high-speed Internet connections.

SpectraCom, a Milwaukee Web development and market research firm has learned that, as traffic to its sites grows, it must make adjustments. It always had a large enough pipeline to the Internet -- a T-1 line -- but it has gone from one server to six in the last two years, said President Jori Clarke.

Traffic problems at a site vary depending on the site itself, the size of the server's memory and the number of central processing units on the server, she said.

SpectraCom monitors each of its sites daily and moves a site to a larger server if it gets too many requests, Clarke said.

Another common reason for clunky response times is that a portion of the Internet's backbone is overburdened, said David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!, the popular Internet directory and search engine.

Yahoo! has gone from 10 servers and one T-3 connection a year ago to 40 servers and three T-3 connections.

Filo said if users have trouble pulling up the Yahoo! Web site, it's because traffic is having trouble making it through overused portions of the backbone.

Users also have to keep in mind that the Internet is only as fast as the slowest connection along the route. If your computer has a 14.4 kbps modem, it doesn't matter if the final destination has the fastest connection possible. Your information will move at 14.4 kbps, said Ryan Brooks, chief technical officer at Internet Connect.

Other technical problems occur at network routers.

All information that moves on the Internet is broken into pieces called packets and a router has to know where to send the packets, Brooks said. A single e-mail message may be sent on its way as 20 packets of data.

When a router receives these packets, it looks at its instructional tables and forwards them to a router in another location until the packets eventually reach their final destination.

If routers are bombarded with information that is too complex, they "flap" and the message stops. A flap could be caused by faulty software, human error or an overload.

"As people add networks to it and networks move around, it becomes more complex," Brooks said.

In the last few months, the number of routes to process has gone from 30,000 to 40,000, he said.

Once the backbone providers learn of a flap, they can fix it, but they can't predict when one will occur, Brooks said.

If you're the unlucky stiff who was waiting for a Web page when a router has a flap, you'll go right on waiting because the messages won't get through. You have two options: Stop loading the Web page and resend the request, or try later.

Filo said the router problem isn't likely to go away soon. "If a router is fine today, a month from now, it's overloaded," said Filo of Yahoo! "Everything keeps growing, and the problem keeps getting larger and larger, and everyone gets limited."

Yahoo! has tried to compensate for router problems by setting up servers closer to users. The company has servers in Japan and Britain and soon will have one in Washington, D.C., Filo said.

In the hundreds of major routers on the Internet that have a full set of informational tables, a flap occurs once about every two weeks, estimates Ellsworth of Internet Connect. It may last a few seconds or several hours.

"The routers have a lot of work to do with keeping up with demand," said Chase of Alpha Dot Net.

The Internet is also experiencing its own symptoms of gridlock. Most Internet traffic makes multiple, or even dozens, of "stops" on its journey.

Routers at each of these stops look for the most direct path but, if that route is congested, the message will have to make more "hops" or take a longer route, delaying its progress, Brooks said.

Compare it to a drive to Chicago. The most direct route is straight down Interstate 94. But if there is a major tie-up on that road, it might be quicker to take an out-of-the way route down I-43 toward Rockford, Ill., then double back on I-90 to Chicago.

The number of hops an item makes is also determined by how close a site is to the backbone. One recent day, it took 12 hops to get from Internet Connect's network in Wauwatosa to Marquette University. The same day, it took just five hops to get from Internet Connect to Netscape Communications Corp. in Mountain View, Calif.

Internet traffic from Marquette has to make 10 hops through a maze of other connections before it gets to MCI, part of the Internet backbone.

Traffic from Netscape is but one stop from the backbone and only has to go through four points along it before it reaches Internet Connect.

To help reduce the number of hops, connection providers such as Internet Connect have added special switches call asynchronous transfer modes.

Companies servicing the Internet also are doing more engineering to better handle the traffic, said Baker of the Internet Society. For instance, about two years ago, all traffic on the Internet that moved between Europe and the U.S. moved through one network meeting point in Maryland called MAE East. Now, large Internet companies have created multiple points around the country (called Network Access Points or NAPs) that are connected to Europe, Baker said.

"That was just a matter of looking at the traffic and saying where is the hot spot," Baker said. Internet companies and associations will continue to attack such problems and compensate for it, Baker said.

"It's the same kind of thing that went on in the telephone backbone."

There are other plans to improve traffic flow. Among them:

Wider "pipes": Right now, the fattest connections are OC-3 lines, which are 100 times larger than the T-1 lines that were running the entire Internet a mere four years ago. But by the end of the year, Internet providers will be using OC-12 lines, which are four times larger still, Ellsworth said.

Router technology must evolve to handle these wider pipes, said Hidalgo of Sprint. In the meantime, Sprint is laying triple DS-3 lines, which give the effect of the wider pipe but are better suited to the existing routers, he said.

Better routers: Cisco Systems Inc., which makes the routers carrying 80% of the Internet backbone traffic, is working on major enhancements. Two weeks ago, Cisco introduced Tag Switching, which will "scale" the Internet by integrating routing and switching on existing platforms, said Adam Stein, a Cisco spokesman. Scaling will reserve "private lanes" along the Internet for traffic to follow.

Prioritizing bandwidth: This will allow signals that need immediate attention (such as network identifiers) to get through first, Hidalgo said. E-mail for instance, though important, does not need instantaneous delivery and can lag a little. Companies and organizations are developing technology that will allow Internet signals to be "RSVPed" in this way. Expect to see some of that emerging by the beginning of next year, Hidalgo said.

Pay for use: Many Internet users pay a flat fee regardless of how much information they pull up. Some say that's unfair, said Fazio of Minnesota Regional Network. But technology still has to evolve to better meter traffic. "You have to find different ways of using the Internet and maybe change our expectation levels."

Private exchange points: Until recently, most of the backbone traffic met and exchanged traffic at three points called MAE East in Maryland, MAE West in California and NAP in Chicago. But Sprint's Internet division has begun setting up agreements to exchange traffic with many of the other backbone providers privately rather than using the public switch points.

"The more people that come to a public exchange, the more congested it becomes," Hidalgo said. Sprint expects to have 10 of these private points up by the end of the year, which will reduce congestion.

Like any emerging technology, old problems will be solved just as new problems crop up. The Internet itself is the best example of this.

Three years ago, before Internet browsers like Mosaic and Netscape swept the nation, almost everyone had to use Unix language to navigate. Now, you'd be hard-pressed to find any new users who know such commands. To read e-mail in those days, users had to type "elm" to get to the mail directory and, from there, learn control commands to compose and send mail (control C-X would send mail, control C-H gave a help menu). Now, mail can be retrieved with a few clicks of a mouse.

But for the all the improvements, the Internet has a long way to go before it is a truly mass medium. And once it becomes a mass medium, it may also be a new medium, Hidalgo said.

"If you want a commercial grade Internet, it may not be the wild and woolly Internet we have today," he said.

Just as the Internet evolved from ARPANet, to NSFNet to the commercialized backbone, Internet users will eventually see a new incarnation.

But while plans are constantly being drawn up, it's hard to predict whether anything now on the drawing board will solve all the Internet's woes.

"Even if we do get those solutions developed, it might be a while before we can take advantage of them," Hidalgo said.

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