The Future of the Internet

The Future of the Internet

Brokarda.com - http://generalknowlege.blogspot.com/

It’s on television, in magazines and newspapers, in every known media to man; and it are in our homes, our offices and our schools. Everywhere you go, you hear about Internet. Dubbed the Information Superhighway, one might think that this network of millions of computers around the globe is as fast and as captivating as a Steven Spielberg movie. Sadly, that is not the case. With more and more users logging on everyday, and staying on longer and longer, the Information Superhighway could perhaps be more accurately referred to as the Clogged Highway; like one you might find in a cosmopolitan city during peak hours.

Users are often frustrated at busy signals and slow speeds. The corporate giant, America Online, Incorporated ( AOL ) has recently been the target of several lawsuits over this because when it changed it’s pricing plan, so many new users logged on to the Internet that it’s system could not handle the overwhelming traffic. Inevitably, its system ran at a very slow speed as it tried to accommodate the multitude of extra users who were fortunate enough to have logged on to Internet. However, a myriad others were greeted with busy signals. And this led to the sad state of affairs where users began staying on-line much longer, even when they were not actually doing anything worthwhile on the Internet, because they knew that they would not be able to log on easily again if they logged off. America Online was thus forced to upgrade almost all its equipment, lease more telephone lines, and make a formal apology to all its users for the whole sad and sorry episode. AOL even refunded its users who were unable to log on during that period!

Things have come to such a state that some pundits are predicting that, due to the lengthy Internet calls and the necessary bandwidth these calls take up, one day, in the near future, the entire telephone network will simply collapse and cease to function. One such theory that totes this total collapse of the telecommunication system is the Gridlock Theory. There are a few telecommunication gurus who proclaim that steps can be taken to avoid such a disaster by, for example, upgrading telephone lines and limiting Internet usage.

However, Bob Metcalfe, creator of the Ethernet, believes that to clogging of the Internet will only get worse as his company had faced the problem of a system shutdown caused by this heavy usage that denied 400,000 people access to the Internet for almost thirteen hours!

It is estimated that twenty-five to thirty million people use the Internet. According to a recent study by Pacific Bell, an average Internet call last five times longer that ten percent of Internet calls last at least six hours. This can cause switches to overload and, in turn, cause telecommunication failures or shutdowns.

Internet services take up 2.5 percent of the telephone lines in most cosmopolitan cities, and they are using twenty to thirty-six percent of the total telephone network capacity. Local calls often occupy a line for hours. With hordes of people hogging the Internet and the number growing by 200 percent annually, it certainly provides new challenges for the telephone companies!

The Internet, up to a few ears ago, was used only to read text. Then in the early 1990’s, a technological breakthrough in multimedia programming paved the way for pictures and sounds to be ‘loaded’ on to the Internet. This breakthrough was responsible for the Internet craze we see today.

Today, the Internet offers much more then just picture, text, and sound. Internet chat rooms, voice communications, video conferencing and video games are a few examples. Additionally, voice conversations over the Internet (possible with the proper software and a cheap microphone) allow users to talk virtually anyone, anywhere in the world-for the price of the local call they make to their Internet Service Provider. Video Conferencing allows users the same thing, with the added exciting dimensions of being able to see the person of persons they are in conference with.

And finally, when once you needed at least a computer system and a modem to log on to the Internet, you no longer needed these hardware to surf the Internet. Now, devices such as Web TV provide access to the Internet via the television, and the latest third generation cellular phones with built-in modems allow dial-up access to the Internet for E-mails and information services.

Needless to say, the telecommunications network was neither designed nor built to handle this much of heavy traffic. Many telephone companies and even government agencies are spending huge sums of money to upgrade telephone lines but alas, the fundamental architecture of the network allows only so much, or rather, so little.

K.Kao and G. Hockman were the first to come up with the idea of using fibre optic cable ( as opposed to copper wires ) , to carry telephone signals. Instead of sound waves, fibre optics use pulses of light to transmit binary code, such as those used in computers and other electronic devices, through the lines. Other telecommunications-based companies are also trying to get a dig at solving the telecommunications crisis. Two modem manufactures have introduced faster models to satisfy the need for speed.

Not to be outdone, cable television companies are introducing Internet access in some places. Bu accessing the Internet through the coaxial cable that provides television to homes, the speed can be increased a thousandfold. However, there is one major setback: the cable system was built to send information one way only. In other words, these Internet services can only be used to browse the web; it cannot be used to upload or send anything back. And so, for these services to catch on among users, the entire cable infrastructure has to be replaces to cater to dual carriage of signals. And that would be one tremendously costly affair amounting to, in all probabilities, billions of dollars!

Speed on the Internet may sound like a viable permanent solution to the problem, but, let us just ponder over this: what happens when new lanes are created to ease traffic congesting and slowing down access even worse than it currently is.

To help solve the problem of Internet hogging, some Internet services providers are toying with new price plans for their customers. Instead of a fixed flat rate for Internet access, some services providers are setting a maximum access time per month at a flat rate and then charge for the extra hours used on a different price scale. Other services providers have started using a priority- based system where users who want better and faster access would pay more then those who just want to check and send E-mails. Yet, others are offering plans on an on-demand-basis. What this means is that customers pay a nominal fee for normal web browsing and pay for extra services, such as uploading and downloading files, only when they actually use those services.

So in conclusion, the only solution that remains to keep the Internet usable and fairly fast is not on the improvement of existing telephone lines and other costly technological solutions, but rather, it is in keeping our own personal usage on check.

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