North American Network Operators Group

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Your morning FUD

  • From: Austin Schutz
  • Date: Thu Oct 21 13:22:18 1999

http://news.excite.com/news/zd/991020/12/report-warns-of

 SAN FRANCISCO -- Internet performance is too low to support
 serious transactional business by ASPs, and trends indicate that
 improvements may be inadequate over the next several years, a
 recent study has found. 

 Northeast Consulting Resources Inc., of Boston, reports that the
 growing complexity of Web pages and increased network delays will
 reverse improvements in Internet performance built over the last
 four years. 

 The findings are bad news for application service providers, which
 promise to deliver enterprise resource planning and customer
 relationship management applications. 

 "When the ASP applications come, the time of reckoning will
 appear," Peter Sevcik, an analyst for NCRI, said earlier this month
 at the 1999 Global Internet Performance Conference here. 

 Router runaround 

 NCRI says technology improvements have cut the average
 download time of basic business Web pages from 12 seconds to 6
 seconds since 1995, a significant drop despite a 120 percent increase
 in page size. 

 However, those improvements may not be sustainable over the next
 three years because overall delays within the Internet have become
 significantly higher, due primarily to the increasing number of
 routers. 

 More routers are added as sites deploy additional hardware to
 provide more scalability. The increasing number of router hops
 imposed upon data could deteriorate availability to about 9 seconds,
 the study found. 

 NCRI based its study on data provided by Keynote Systems Inc., a
 San Mateo, Calif., Web performance research company that
 publishes the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index, an
 industry benchmark based on the performance and reliability of 40
 leading business Web sites. 

 Keynote announced here at the conference the Keynote Consumer
 40 Internet Performance Index, which will be based on the
 performance of 40 consumer Web sites accessed through a 56K-bps
 modem. 

 Indexes also will be available for digital subscriber line and cable
 modems, and the whole package will be sold as the Keynote
 Consumer Perspective service, which will be available later this
 quarter, company officials said. 

 Pricing was not yet available.