By now every man, woman, and child on the globe is probably aware of the Internet and its over-hyped theoretical potential to provide access to just about any type of information, from medical records concerning the Ebola virus to video clips of Gerry Garcia and audio clips of that famous entertainer who twirled his hips. Along with the commercial hype, corporate officials at just about every level in the organization are beginning to become afflicted by the Internet. Over the past few months I could have retired if I received a dollar for every query from corporate officers wanting to know why we still have a private network and didn't move all our transmission to the Internet. After all, it's free, isn't it?
If your corporate officers are like mine, they probably forgot that old adagethere's no free lunch. While anybody can obtain Internet access for under $20 a month via dozens of Internet Access Providers (IAPs), and AT&T and MCI now offer customers five hours of free access per month, the use of the Internet for business is not only not free, but is a risky proposition. This risk not only involves security, but, in addition, must include network performance issues.
Although hackers have gravitated to the Internet like flies to honey, they are just a portion of the potential security problem. Since a router programmed to advertise a low cost for routing access in effect acts like a pump sucking up data, it becomes possible for your best friend or worst enemy to view your organization's Internet traffic. Concerning network performance, if you recently used Archie, Veronica, or your favorite Web browser to surf the Web, you probably noticed that access to some sites that previously took seconds may now require a repeated sequence of access attempts that can span minutes or even hours. Let's face it, the popularity of the Internet and its hype of 'something for nothing', which resulted in the transmission of video clips of Mickey Mouse, audio clips of Madonna, and tens of thousands of phone calls, is resulting in a bandwidth overload.
Sites that are using 56 Kbps links should have long ago upgraded to T1, while many T1 links probably require fractional T3 or multiple T1 connections. However, from a cynical point of view, there is little incentive for upgrading tens of thousands of corporate connections that are used mainly as a low-cost advertising mechanism for company products. After all, do they really care if it takes a Web surfer 5 or 15 seconds to view their home page? Unfortunately, all these relatively low speed links are used as a mechanism for Internet Access Providers to plan their backbone connection facilities and those plans never assumed those links would reach saturation so fast. Thus, even as organizations increase the operating rate of circuits providing Internet access to their Web servers, IAPs are hard pressed to upgrade their backbone network to accommodate the increase in traffic. This is resulting in a vicious cycle of performance bottlenecks alternating