Event
Summary
A recent study
by Peter Sevcik of Northeast Consulting Services has raised the visibility of
possible near-term problems with Internet performance. Sevcik studied Web-page
delay both analytically and through experiments, the latter using data from
Keynote Systems. He explains Web-page delay in terms of two parameters: Payload
is the number of bytes a server sends to a browser for complete one page, and
Turns are the number of times a browser must exchange packets that do not contain
content, such as a query-response pair. Turns reflect page complexity, since
each item on a page requires its own query-response exchange. He concludes that
since 1995 the payload associated with the average business page has grown by
80% while the complexity, as reflected in turns, has grown by 121%. Up to now
the performance seen by users has actually improved due to a number of technical
and infrastructure advances, with the Web's ability to deliver doubling every
24 months. However, Sevcik warns that this rate of improvement may not be sustainable
because of the number of router hops between the browser and the destination
server. The number of hops is a reflection of both the complexity and the underlying
architecture of the Internet.
According to
Zona Research, there is a cutoff when a page load takes more than eight seconds;
after eight seconds more than one third of shoppers become frustrated and give
up. Also recently released is a study from the Census Bureau showing that in
1997 there were 57 million U.S. citizens using the Internet. Current estimates
have placed the number of shoppers still only a fraction of the total surfer
population at over 40 million in 1999, and predict more than 80 million shoppers
in the year 2000. Zona suggests that the lost sales could exceed $4 billion
in value.
Market
Impact
We predict
that once Y2K is no longer the permanent technology news item, Internet performance
will take its place. With more companies looking to use rich media and streaming
technologies, either within their websites or within their ads, performance
will become an increasingly important issue especially to entertainment and
shopping sites. This will add impetus to businesses and venture capitalists
to invest in fundamentally different approaches to reducing delay.
One approach
that is available to businesses is caching. Companies plant caching servers
around the Internet. When an object such as an image or sound file is requested
by a browser, it can be retrieved from a nearby cache, which reduces the number
of hops. Caching services can be sold to Web publishers, who can pre-store their
data, or to ISPs, which will take advantage of cached copies of objects that
have already been requested. Akamai, which played a prominent role in the recent
Net Aid concert, is a player in this market.
A second approach
is to find an alternate pathway. For example, iBeam, which recently received
$42 million in funding from Intel, Microsoft and others, deploys its own servers
linked by satellite to avoid network delays.