When I am not on-air with NetTalk, I am living, breathing, and working in the technology industry. As I meet people from many walks of life, I find they have many different ideas of which technology is the best for high speed Internet access. As many of these ideas are wrong, let me explain why.

First you must realize that today, the average speed of the Internet is 50k bits per second. This means that your ISDN, ADSL, Cable modems, and other pure digital high-speed connections that most of us dream about will not be 1000 times faster than your old dialup analog modem. The numbers that @Home states on their web-site is that they are 100 times faster than a modem and 15 times faster than ISDN. Your mileage will vary as these numbers are usually only seen on paper. Heading out to download the latest Real player from www.real.com with your cable modem will probably show you 50-100K/second as long as your high speed provider has built out their backbone with extremely high speed, and expensive connections to the major Internet providers. If they have built out their connection with only T-1 connections, this will by MUCH slower as many people will be competing for that bandwidth. This is still a drastic improvement over the 1-3K/second that your analog modem will retrieve files on, but nothing like the megabytes per second speed that many people imagine these services will provide.

What is nice however with DLS and cable modem connections is that you can watch a 200k/second Real Video streamed movie, check your email, download a game at nearly 100k/second and surf the web all at the same time. As long as your provider has robust connections to the Internet, you will be able to multi-task like you never have before! Because you are going though different sites and servers, you will not always go through the same peering points and thus have a robust connection.

One of the reasons why the net is so slow is because of the peering points, or NAPs (Network Access Point) and MAEs (Metro Area Ethernet) that are buckling under the pressure of rapid Internet growth. The Internet network is no longer a single entity like it was before 1993. With the commercialization of the net, it has become SEVERAL global networks that connect to each other at peering points. Four major NAPs; one in San Francisco, Chicago, New Jersey, and Washington handle most of this "hand-off" traffic.

If your ISP buys service from Alternet and you head to www.usatoday.com to check the latest news, your connection will most likely head to San Francisco where it hops off the Alternet backbone and onto the GlobalCenter network at a peering point before reaching its final destination at the UsaToday servers in Sunnyvalle. All of this takes place very quickly, but would be MUCH faster if your ISP purchased a connection from GlobalCenter networks and your traffic would not go trough a peering point. This would only make your USA Today and whoever else buys from GlobalCenter trips faster however, and would not help out on many of the other sites you visit who do not buy service from them. Whenever data switches networks at peering points, it slows down because of everyone else trying to do the same thing that you are – get to another network. If you head to another site however, like ESPN’s www.sportzone.com your data heads to Seattle on Alternet (bypassing the SLOW MAE-West peering point) and hops on Verio’s network before reaching Starwave’s servers. In this instance, your information is sent to you much faster.

Now that we know why the net is relatively slow because of bandwidth (or lack thereof) at the peering points, let us talk about what your ISP does in your hometown. No matter what connection you have; modem, ISDN, cable, etc your ISP still has limited capacity where they connect their network to one or more of the Internet backbone providers. This is shared bandwidth. Many people complain that cable modems share bandwidth in each neighborhood, ADSL shares bandwidth at each telephone Central Office, or CO but they are forgetting that their current ISP shares bandwidth at their POP, or Point of Presence where their telephone lines originate. Remember, all data bandwidth is shared, whether it is in your neighborhood, at the ISP POP or at the NAPs. This is a fact of life until multicast, or the capability for multiple users to simultaneously receive the same bits is available. Multicast is the same principle as radio and TV broadcasts. One tower sends the signal out to every home that can tune into the program. No one takes anything away from that signal as they retrieve it. This is very much unlike the Internet today.

It is easy with modems and ISDN to determine what size connection you need to the Internet. If you have 50 people connecting with ISDN pulling an average of 40K/second and 100 modems pulling an average of 2K/second the ISP needs at least two T-1 lines. This handles the 2200K/second average use, and capability to burst up to 3000K/second during peak times. If your ISP is smart, they buy one T-1 from one provider, and the second from a different provider. This will eliminate many instances of routing data though peering points, and also provide redundancy to overcome network outages.

Enter high bandwidth. Now the numbers I stated above have gotten much larger. High-end personal computers can handle around 7 Megabits/second through a 10-Megabit PCI Ethernet card. Now the ISP’s must buy one or more 45 Megabit DS-3 connections at around $50,000 per month to the Internet backbone to be able to feed their customers. They must also build out a robust WAN or Wide Area Network in the neighborhoods to get that data back to their central head-end (what cable companies originate their broadcasts from) or POP to get out onto the Internet. With cable companies like @Home you will find DS-3 networks that carry the requests from the neighborhoods back to a connection to the Internet. With ADSL you will find telephone companies setting up a Frame Relay connection to get back to their centralized Internet connection. Both of these are again shared neighborhood networks taking you back to the shared Internet connection. As long as your providers build out high-speed ATM and Frame Relay connections in your neighborhood this topology should not effect your speed because you are sharing bandwidth to get past their POPs and head-ends. If they do not build out robust neighborhood networks, or if they do not connect with multiple DS-3 Internet feeds, you will only see high-speed connections when you download data from their servers and proxies. Proxies are devices that hold a local copy of a web-site off of the Internet. When a request is made for a web page by a subscriber, the proxy fills the request locally without getting it off of the Internet.

Unfortunately you will never find this information while reading tough the marketing information on Telephone companies DSL and cable companies web sites. This is the dark side of the bandwidth business, and you heard it here first. So jump on your proxy and let the packets fly!

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