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Where's the Bandwidth?

As most of you know, I'm a weather nut. When we lived on the boat I spent more time watching The Weather Channel than my kids used to spend watching "The Brady Bunch". When we moved ashore in February I had a major decision to make. Cable TV or no Cable TV--That was the question. We opted for no cable. Like my wife Nancy said "Watch it on your computer. Everything else is on the internet, isn't it?"

True thought I. Last year I never even got a plotting chart out to track the storms during the hurricane season. No big deal, just click over to the Hawaii site and viola, you have it! Or on the outside chance that that server is busy there are hundreds of other weather URLs available.

But that was last year and this is this year. Last month when hurricane Bertha roared up the Atlantic threatening the east coast, not only was it impossible to access the weather servers, the whole internet system seemed to come to a screetching halt. During the peak of the storm much of the Northeast hub was inaccessible, or if available only at very low transmission rates.

Then just last week Microsoft announced the availability of its Internet Explorer 3.0. Once again this single event had a major impact on the network. And now it is Netscape's turn with the availability of the final version of 3.0. The people providing the backbone of the internet, mainly MCI, Sprint and a few others are scrambling to keep up with the demand. MCI should up its capacity from 150 Mega bits per second (Mbps) to around 600 Mbps sometime this fall, and the other carriers will be following shortly thereafter. The problem is that the net population and expectations are growing even faster. Here are a couple of my concerns.

• Population
  • The internet has an intrinsic growth rate which has it doubling in population (number of computers on the system) every 4-6 months. Estimates vary and apparently it is nearly impossible to obtain an accurate estimate of this number, especially the overseas components. On this basis alone, increasing the network bandwidth from 150 to 600 Mbps would give us an 8-12 month reprieve. But there's more...

  • Sony and Phlips have just announced that their WebTV box will be available by the middle of October. This little item will sell for $329. All you have to do is hook it up to your TV and plug a phone line into it and you'll be ready to surf the web! Obviously, they are looking at the Christmas market and hope to sell millions of these little boxes over the holidays. As almost all of you will agree, installing the software, getting the modem/dialer to work, getting the DNS addresses correct, etc. makes getting on the net a pretty complicated job. If Sony/Phillips can pull it off, anyone who can hook up a VCR to a TV will be able to get on the World Wide Web. I can see it now, 30 million new surfers by the end of the year. Gads, where did that bandwidth go anyway?

• Applications
  • As I reported in previous newsletters, multimedia goodies are easy to install and fun to play with. RealAudio provides real time audio streaming, crescendo allows the compact midi files to be heard, QuickTime and others provide for video, and just recently Intel's Internet Phone eliminates the need for long distance telephoning. The price? Just another few hundred Mbps, please...

  • Now that the new version three browsers are available, I'm considering upgrading from Netscape 2.02. But have you checked out the size of the new programs? Depending upon whether you want all the goodies or just the bare bones, you could be talking up to 6 Mbytes of download. At 28.8 kbps that's quite a haul and at 14.4 kbps, forget it! At this rate everyone will be setting up to auto download at 3 a.m. and where will that leave those of us who enjoy the relative speed advantage from getting up with the chickens?

Search Engines--Some Comments

I'm no expert on these gadgets, but I spend enough time searching for stuff that I've formed an opinion or two and I'm happy to share my thoughts with those of you who are loyal enough to wade through my monthly random thought processes. The first thing that I've noticed is that most of the engines do not search in true Boolean fashion. For example, if I type: Fort Myers in Yahoo! I get 25 hits. Wow. I think there should be more that that on the web, so I click on AltaVista cuz it shows up right there on the Yahoo! page (why, I wonder?) and BANG! I have 59,445 hits. What a difference! Then off to Excite! and DOUBLE BANG! 505,679 hits. Now I'm beginning to wonder "Is more better?"

In order to understand what's happening it is necessary to know just how the various engines form their databases. For example, some (like Web Crawler) actually go over the entire page and use all the words on it for searching. Unfortunately, that makes words like "the" and "and" just as important as "Florida" and "Fort Myers". Another engine uses the first 200 words of the page as the keyword source. Thus for these guys the web author must be sure to get to the verbal point in a hurry or only meaningless rhetoric will be cached. Yahoo! uses a section called "Comments" to provide keywords and finally, engines like Excite and AltaVista use internal document meta tags to generate the search criteria. As a web author, I definitely prefer the latter. You can keep the obvious keying function invisible to the reader and yet really get to the point and insure that your page will "come up" when the proper key words are used.

Further, some engines like AltaVista and Excite provide the ability to add a plus sign to a word that absolutely *must* be present and a minus sign for a word that must not be present. For example, +manatees -baseball would eliminate the professional ballclub from appearing in my search for manatee sites. Phrases can be defined using quotation marks, so that unique word groups can be searched for.

According to the latest thinking, there are anywhere from 50-100 Million web sites today. Speed, then becomes a factor too. The winner? This guy votes for AltaVista!

I've got lots more "fun" topics to explore, but they'll have to wait until next time. In the meantime, if you run into something you would like to have me add to this list, give me a URL and short description via e-mail.

Don't forget to contact me if you would like to be put on an e-mail list for announcements for the Internet Special Interest Group (ISIG) meetings in the southwest Florida area. We hold them monthly on the first Tuesday of the month. Next month's (September) meeting will be held on September 3rd. The meeting time is 7 p.m. We'll once again meet at CyberStreet's new office complex at 1721 Hendry Street. That's just one door south of the Dunkin' Donut place on Hendry in downtown Ft. Myers. We haven't selected a topic yet, so you have time to volunteer ;-) Check back later in the month for any updates to our meeting plans.

ew schedules for the introductory internet course are being drawn up. If you have an interest in this class, or know of someone who is, drop a note to me, or give me a call at 772-1663. Have a friend interested in joining the fun on the internet? Have him call me and we'll get him started with an introductory package.

In addition to the introductory class, I am also available for personalized instruction on the internet, Windows95, Word Processing, or what have you. My rates are $20/hour. Reasonable for individual instruction, I believe. Give me a call at 772-1663, or send me an e-mail message and we can talk about your particular needs.

Comments about this page should be sent to Dr. Bob Lade. Reactions, positive or negative will be carefully considered. You're also invited to visit my Home Page to learn a little more about me, my family and our lifestyle.

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