Web Usage Analysis Guide
The word from the wireheads: Don't worry, be happy. Like a frustrated commuter at rush hour, consumers increasingly are running into traffic jams, bottlenecks and other delays when trying to log onto the Internet. Unless the logjam is unclogged soon, experts are concerned that the Internet will go the way of fads such as the Hula-Hoop or pet rock. But in the continuous cycle of hope and despair over the Internet's future, the smart money has consistently been on hope through Php visitor counter. Though not everything has gone smoothly, the Internet has added millions of new users and hundreds of thousands of new commercial domains. The Net has also survived the demise of the NSFNet backbone, the installation of the Network Access Points (NAPs, facilities where different networks interconnect) and many doublings in packet traffic over the few last years. Now it appears there is another series of demands on the infrastructure in emerging bandwidth-intensive applications, the mass addition of new users and networks, and the lack of well-defined business models and coordination facilities for network service providers. Consider just one recent development: Netscape's release of CoolTalk, which provides voice telephony capabilities over the Net. Thanks toa few lines of code, an application that could save users huge amounts of money is now freely available to everyone. It's also intolerantof delay and has the potential to devour bandwidth. Seems like something to worry about. Yet by some measures, the Internet in the US already has coast-to-coast capacity greater than that of the voice telephony network. That may be surprising, but network engineers estimate that voice traffic, if encoded using today's more efficient algorithms, would peak about one gigabit per second. That's slightly less than best guess/estimates of the Net's installed capacity. With multiple carriers and no central backbone, it's hard to get an accurate picture of what is going on. From talking to network engineers at major providers, though, it'sapparent that these challenges on the Net, while formidable, are notinsoluble. For one thing, talking about the Internet as if it were one thing isnaive. "The Internet is highly heterogeneous. It's made up of 97,000networks, and some don't have the capacity to service their user base," president of the Internet Society Donald Heath said. "Some of theNAPs are swamped, sometimes access lines are overloaded, and users can get a feeling the Net is congested when there are problems with a single host." Capacity problems are inherently cyclical. "New users are coming on the Net continuously, but capacity installation is like a step function," Heath added. For example, MCI recently upgraded its backbone from 45 Mbps to 155 Mbps, and announced plans to go to 622 Mbps in the near future. "We are carrying four times the traffic of what the NSFNet carried a year ago when it shut down, and we are only one provider among several," manager of Internet services at MCI Rick Wilder said. "Things aren't falling down, but they are not smooth and congestion-free either."
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