With all that raw data flowing through the walls of our house (probably for rather useless purposes such as blasting the heck out of eachother in Descent) it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Internet can be pretty dang slow. The flow of traffic that at times makes the Interstate at rush hour look like the Indy 500 can be equated to a herd of cattle in speed and moodiness. Sure, on the real freeways one can roll a semi over a couple of times and spill a load of pork guts (this happens more often than we'd like to think, unfortunately) all over the road, causing major delays for miles, and even though this can seem like a real pain, consider that all it takes to bring half the Internet to a grinding halt these days is for some random constrution crew out on Podunk, Wisconsin to accidentally cut through a major FDDI backbone cable, and suddenly, half the Internet is crawling at half the speed. There are plenty of bad hair days out on the Internet nowdays.
Ironically, as it seems that the overall speed of the Net is getting slower and slower, it seems that in order to keep up with all the latest Internet technologies, it's going to require a whole heck of a lot more bandwidth than most mortals tend to have these days. Way back when we had to use 8-inch floppy disks and dinosaurs to transport data between two computers (and that was if you had all the fancy stuff, otherwise you ould have to make do with punchcards,) we considered ourselves lucky to have a modem that would connect at 110 baud, and the data had to flow 40 mines through the snow, uphill both ways! (Wait a minute.... I think there's some law saying that one has to be over 65 to start ranting like that, so I better stop.) The speeds eventually increased, and before long, we had 2400 and 9600 baud modems. For many years, this was plenty to go along, as just about everything was text-based, and nobody gave a hang about this "Internet thingie" that has suddenly become all thr rage just about anywhere you look. I mean, if you're here, you're probably a victim of this fad (unless you happen to be living in a cave somewhere and someone came out with a printed copy of this article.)
Then the Internet caught on, and suddenly, all the once easy-going bandwidth has been crammed with all sorts of bandwidth-hogging people scrambling to search for worthwhile content in a sea of spam and pages filled with "Over 64 MB of pictures of my dog Fluffy, all in one .ZIP file!!!!!!" so all of a sudden, 9600 baud isn't anywhere near enough, so you go to 14.4. Then you're fine for a while, but suddenly even that starts to be slow (probably because of the tendency of some people to add a whole lot more exclamation marks than necessary to their pages.) Of course, then all the companies coming up with this stuff realized that people can download this stuff a whole heck of a lot faster with fast modems, so they made stuff that took more and more bandwidth. of course, suddenly this made even a 14.4 seem puny, so all of a sudden we find ourselves having to use 28.8 modems in order to get anything done on the Internet. But still, this wasn't enough.... next came the 33.6K modems, and now the 56K modems. Now, out of the blue, it seems that the industry's come up with yet another three-letter acronym for what's supposed to be the next generation of ridiculously fast Internet connections: DSL. I'm sure that the acronym's supposed to mean something here, but since I'm being lazy here (it's been two weeks sionce I actually wrote a column here) I'll leave it up to you, the probably unwitting reader, to figure out what the heck it means. As for myself, I'm guessing that either the people who are marketing this thing either couldn't count much higher than 56, or that someone out there copyrighted all of those numbers, meaning that they were stuck having to dig into their storage of TLAs to name the sucker.
Anyway, what this wonderful new technology is supposed to mean is that all of a sudden each and every one of us is going to have the bandwith of entire third world countries heading right into our computers or something like that. This is a particularly interesting statement because these were the same people who just a couple of months ago were saying that 56K was the practical limit for connection speeds with our current phone system. Now suddenly this DSL stuff comes out with some big names in the industry behind it (Compaq, Intel and Microsoft) and we're able to get almost 8 megabits out of phone wires! Something seems pretty fishy in Denmark, to borrow the oft-quoted phrase.
With all these high-speed connections suddenly finding their way into the ethers of vaporware (or is it gelware? I guess with hardware-relates stuff, you never know.) I expect that it would be a good time to invest in the smoke and mirrors industry (well, actually with as much evidence about the dangers of smoking that's piling up, perhaps it would be wiser to stick with the mirrors) with all the hype and confusion that will inevitably stem from the whole thing. Maybe through some fluke of marketing, this will pan out and suddenly instead of sitting through boring 20-megabyte downloads, we'll instead be sitting through boring 20-gigabyte downloads instead.