The Future Of The Internet :: essays research papers

Its on television, in magazines, currentspapers, and in our schools. Everywhere you go you hear rough the lucre. Dubbed "The study Superhighway," one might think that this network of millions of computers around the formal is as fast and as captivating as television, but with much and more users recordging on everyday and staying on longer and longer, this "Information Superhighway" could be perhaps more correctly referred to as a clogged Los-Angeles expressway at lunch hour.Users are often discomfited at busy signals and slow speeds. The corporate giant, America Online, Inc, has new-fangledly been the manoeuvre of several lawsuits over this because when it changed its pricing plan, so many new users came on, and so many people started staying on longer, that its system couldnt handle the strain and would stomach very slow and give busy signals to almost everyone that tried to log on. As a result people started staying online because they were afraid that if they logged off, they would never gear up back on. This forced America Online to upgrade enormous amounts of equipment, lease new border lines, and issue commercials apologizing for the whole predicament. They even started giving refunds to users who were never open to get on during the troubled ordeal.Some people are predicting, because of the length of Internet calls and the amount of bandwidth the calls take, that one day in the not so outside future, the entire telephone network, or at least a bang-up portion of it, give cease to function, and all telephone calls will betray to connect. This idea is referred to by some as the "Gridlock Theory." Others advise that steps give the bounce be taken to avoid such a disaster, such as upgrading phone lines and limiting Internet usage.Following the gridlock idea is Ethernet creator Bob Metcalfe, who believes that the slowdowns will only get worse. "We recently had an outage... (that) denied 400,00 people access to the Internet, in its entirety, for thirteen hours. I expect even worse cases to develop this year." (Hunter, the Internet.)It is estimated that twenty- fiver to thirty million users currently are on the Internet. According to a recent study by Pacific Bell, and average 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 jackpot cause switches to overload and, in turn, cause telephone calls to fail.