The Future Of The Internet :: essays research papers

Its on television, in magazines, newspapers, and in our schools. Everywhere you go you hear about the meshing. Dubbed "The Information Superhighway," one might think that this web of millions of computers around the globe is as fast and as captivating as television, but with more and more users logging on everyday and staying on longer and longer, this "Information Superhighway" could be perhaps more mightily referred to as a clogged Los-Angeles expressway at lunch hour.Users argon often frustrated at busy signals and slow speeds. The corporate giant, the States Online, Inc, has recently been the target of several lawsuits over this because when it changed its pricing plan, so numerous new users came on, and so many people started staying on longer, that its system couldnt regale the strain and would run very slow and give busy signals to just about everyone that tried to log on. As a result people started staying online because they were terror-struck that if they logged off, they would never get back on. This forced America Online to upgrade extensive amounts of equipment, lease new prognosticate lines, and issue commercials apologizing for the whole predicament. They even started bounteous refunds to users who were never able to get on during the troubled ordeal.Some people be predicting, because of the length of Internet calls and the amount of bandwidth the calls take, that one day in the not so distant future, the entire reverberate network, or at least(prenominal) a great portion of it, will cease to function, and all telephone calls will fail to connect. This idea is referred to by some as the "Gridlock Theory." Others suggest that steps can be taken to avoid such a disaster, such as upgrading phone lines and limiting Internet usage.Following the gridlock idea is Ethernet overlord Bob Metcalfe, who believes that the slowdowns will only get worse. "We recently had an outage... (that) denied 400,00 people portal to the Internet, in its entirety, for thirteen hours. I expect even worse cases to unfold this year." (Hunter, the Internet.)It is estimated that twenty-five to thirty million users currently are on the Internet. accord to a recent study by Pacific Bell, and fairish Internet call lasts five times as longer as the average regular telephone call. 10 percent of the Internet calls last 6 hours or longer. This can cause switches to overload and, in turn, cause telephone calls to fail.