Data Deluge Poses Bandwidth Challenge

by John D. White, Technology Correspondent

Although many claim the Internet as their offspring, one of its genuine ancestors emerged from science sections of state education departments. It began as a bulletin board system uniting school districts and then states in a network to enable generous sharing of ideas. When Carolyn Graham showed me the New York State Education Department's access a decade or so ago, the board already connected 48 states. The benefits and possibilities awed me then but I had no idea how much more valuable this pioneering connection would be a decade later.

Almost from its beginning the Internet and its progeny, the World Wide Web, have exceeded the most utopian prophecies. The main governor of its performance has been the growth of the connection wires and hardware, sometimes called the backbone. Simple text messages flowed adequately at the beginning despite the glacial speed of available modems and computers. The 1990s featured a lead-changing race between marketing of e-services and providing the equipment to make them work well enough to make people want to pay for them. The winner remains in doubt.

The standard term for breadth of ability to carry information is bandwidth. Each year, however, the pressure for increased information flow has strained the capacity of thriving networks of wire, fiberoptics, satellites, and microwave dishes. A second dedicated telephone line for businesses and homes for FAX machines and modems quickly proved inadequate as email and Internet usage grew. Internet service providers (ISPs) began to offer unlimited service for little more than the cost of metered use in previous years. Devotees then logged on early and stayed on all day to avoid the growing delays in going online. Clever programs "pinged" signals to the ISPs to avoid automatic cutoffs after too much idle time. Many businesses and educational institutions then added a third dedicated line to free up both full-time voice and FAX lines.

Instead of pure text, a flood of graphical images from the ISP and the growing millions of Web sites began to strain the backbone and leisurely modems. Fanatics donated their 300-baud models to beginners and replaced them with 1200, 2400, 9600, 14,400, 28,800 models until they reached the final frontier for this type, the long-awaited "56K." A delay in universal standards resulted from vendors selling clashing versions of the 56K modems until a third version called V.90 emerging as the de facto norm for most ISPs. Despite the speed capability of the modem equipment, most email and Internet traffic still flows well below the 53K rate. In a way analogous to highway traffic, rush-hour slowdowns occur on the Internet, too, and often continue to midnight.

By the middle 1990s colleges and local public libraries began to offer free Internet access at home for their students, staff, or patrons. Continuing growth of Delphi, Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online sent a deluge of graphics information through available electronic arteries. A virtual flash flood of data traffic continued to rise faster than investors and existing communications companies expected. Several years ago I downloaded a free "applet," a program enabling me to listen at my Long Island computer to KING-FM in Washington state. Having verified that it really worked, I soon deleted it from the crowded hard disk since we already have a glut of soft-rock stations and a single telephone line into our house. However, live radio via the Internet grew explosively only to be followed by streaming video, which requires far more of the backbone's resources than mere sound needs. The MP3 standard now encourages sharing of high-fidelity music and, according to critics, empowers copyright pirates to save money.

Early this year an acquaintance mounted atop his monitor an inexpensive camera the size of a tennis ball. He uses it to send me "video email," a concept that I'm still digesting. The motion is a bit jerky, but the voice and color picture are better than we saw in the first years of commercial television broadcasts.

Besides the traditional telcos (local telephone companies), many businesses have found it profitable to build vast new backbone facilities for rent on a "common carrier" basis or other arrangement. Continuing deregulation of the former AT & T empire allows competitors of the regional Bells to lease their lines and provide alternative local service. Cable companies have belatedly begun offering Internet access through conventional coaxial connections available to most homes and businesses. The high price and limited marketing success of ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) by the telcos has opened the market for still other choices for high-speed and large-quantity data movement.

Little progress has been made on the worst bottleneck, the scorned "last quarter-mile" of twisted-pair copper wires connecting from the backbone to the end-user. A remarkable feature of the Internet allows a message to follow the path of least resistance over a maze of routes for delivery seconds later anywhere in the world. Hardware redundancy means a severed cable, a downed pole, or lightning striking a server does not stop the message in most cases. The exception is, of course, the last quarter-mile, because of not only its lack of redundancy but also its lack of bandwidth.

Predicting the course of revolutions less dramatic than this one in communications has discredited even the most gifted futurists. Without venturing far into that minefield, let us look at some of the attractive possibilities that may enhance connections for our classrooms, laboratories, homes, businesses and recreational vehicles.

1. Combinations: Basic foundations of information can be stored on hard disks or "jukeboxes" (multiple CDs) available at the computer or via LAN (local area network) from a library nearby. Updates of rapidly-changing information to interact with that database come via cable or wire. The installed database itself can be updated in off-peak hours as needed or at regular intervals via CD to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted via wire at busy times. For example, a century's worth of global weather data on CDs at the computer meshes with hourly upgrades of current weather from international sites plus a weather station just outside the building.

2. Parallel and redundant connections: To supplement the current basic data channel-fiberoptic, coaxial or twisted-pair-the following may come into greater use to relieve traffic congestion:

The digital information torrent seems certain to increase at a rate that will swamp our planning. Soon we will have a continental mat of fiberoptic cables, a swarm of satellites, a grove of antennas inside huge artificial trees plus those now in church steeples and on water towers, dishes on every vehicle and building, and information signals flowing through every AC outlet. These begin to sound not only possible but desirable and even inevitable. Marshall McCluhan's "global village" arrived some time ago with the spread of CNN and cell phones. Now we progress toward a global metropolis which even he failed to envision.

Home          Fall 99          Full Screen

The TEACHERS CLEARINGHOUSE FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY EDUCATION