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 COLUMN
Video spam, anyone?Broadband may causeannoying side effects WEB MARKETERS, gamers, and grandmothers everywhere are waiting with bated breath for high-bandwidth home Internet access to become commonplace. When it does, they'll be able to use the Net for multimedia advertisements, interactive virtual-reality games, and video chats with Junior on the weekends.
Don't get me wrong: The more bandwidth I have, the happier I am. I hate to wait for Web pages, e-mail, and shareware to download. Even a delay of a few seconds while a page appears is enough to make me impatient -- and I'm not alone in feeling this way. Still, I have no illusions about broadband actually decreasing the amount of time I spend waiting while using the Web. The reason is simple: On the Internet, as on California's freeway system, wide highways create traffic. Faced with a congested two-lane highway, the state builds -- at great expense -- a four-or six-lane freeway. At first, cars sail along in the nearly empty lanes. But developers are attracted by the new infrastructure, so they build houses, apartments, office buildings, and shopping malls along the freeway, thus generating more traffic. Pretty soon, you've got six lanes of parking lot instead of two. It's the same on the Internet. The more bandwidth there is, the more applications will crop up to take advantage of it -- and more people will use those applications, especially once they've got the dedicated, always-available Internet connectivity that comes with Digital Subscriber Line or a cable modem. If you build it, they will come. A recent study by Peter Sevcik, a senior associate at Northeast Consulting Resources, in Boston, suggests that there may be some cause for concern about the Net's capability of handling the increasing load. Sevcik's study, online at www.bcr.com/bcrmag/09/99p10.htm, shows that the average Web page is twice as large now as it was in 1995 and downloads in six seconds instead of 12, on average. That's a fourfold improvement over four years -- not too bad. But beneath those figures are more troubling trends, such as the increasing number of router hops between browser and server, which Sevcik suggests is already impairing Internet performance for end-users. Give those end-users broadband access, and the Net's backbone may be quickly overtaxed by videoconferences, downloaded movies, electronic software distribution, and application service providers. From there, it's only a matter of time before someone starts sending video spam to your broadband-enabled inbox. It will probably be the same jokers who send 3MB file attachments now. Bottom line: Web pages will have video clips and interactive applications attached to them instead of mere graphics, but you'll still wait six or more seconds for them to appear. To avert a broadband-induced meltdown, ISPs need to dedicate resources to building a more streamlined network. Web-site owners and marketers need to build more efficient, leaner Web sites. And the industry as a whole needs to move more quickly toward IPv6, which will enable more efficient data-routing and quality-of-service prioritizing, so that we can make sure the data that needs to get through, does. What else does the next millennium's Internet need? Tell me what you think at dylan@infoworld.com. Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld Electric. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993. MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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