Gold class Internet

• Article 2 of 77
• Information Age, November 2000
• View the original article online

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There are ways to overcome at least some of this slowdown, including installing a SSL card in the server or having a standalone SSL accelerator on the network that will decrypt and encrypt content for the server. SSL accelerators can improve e-commerce application performance 50% and increase up to 47 times more connections per second, according to F5. The company has even gone to the extent of producing an SSL load-balancer that integrates an SSL card with a load-balancer so that it can redirect packets based on the decrypted HTTP information.

Another solution is to skip chunks of the Internet or even circumvent it altogether. Companies such as AboveNet and Digital Island have installed their own fibre optic networks around the world onto which traffic can be routed for faster access. Because their web servers have to be one stop from the Internet backbone to do this, the drawback is that interested companies have had to have their web sites hosted by AboveNet or Digital Island (and since Digital Island is on Hawaii, because of the military fibre optics connecting it to Asia and the US, if there’s a problem, there’s not going much they can do about it).

User web-design firm e-Media says that the AboveNet network is capable of handling up to 30 or 40 times its normal traffic. “An internal study showed that for every second the web site was mentioned in a television promotion, the site attracted an extra 150,000 page views,” says CTO Michael Terrata. “Most providers cannot guarantee the headroom required to handle the traffic the site generates without notice. Some of the competitors are running lines at 80 to 90% capacity, much higher than AboveNet’s 50%.”

Since the connection to the US from Europe is one of the bigger bottlenecks in Internet traffic, “most people pay for a direct connection between Uunet and Sprint,” according to Richard Donkin. Traffic from the US intended for these companies’ servers is given priority by routers at either end of the connection.

Start-up QoS, based in Dublin, has leased fibre and satellite connections under an irrevocable right of use from companies such as Global Crossing. Routers classify information packets, giving the company’s clients the ability to select and classify the way content can be provided to customers. CFO Michael Keane says “it’s like classifying a bus lane on a busy highway. You don’t build a new lane to solve the congestion. You just restrict the use of one or two lanes to those with certain needs and functions.” Clients can even make changes to their own levels of bandwidth through a web interface. However, the system has yet to go live so the company can’t say for sure how reliable its service will be.

Figuring out what could be slowing down a web site is not an easy job, but working out how to speed it up is even harder. But with business-to-business e-commerce alone predicted to be worth $7.29 trillion in 2004 by the Gartner Group, the rewards are as high as the penalties are severe.

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