|
March 1998, Vol. 9, No. 3
Pipes
Bandwidth growth hasn't kept pace with other publishing technologies
SEATTLE -- As we lurch into the 21st century, it seems evident that there are a lot of problems facing the publishing industry. Ironically, the biggest one may be that of pipes.
As integrated circuits and disk drives have leapt in size over the course of the last decade -- 10 years ago I had a 20 megabyte disk drive in my desktop machine and was damn happy about it; today my 5 gigabytes seems a little small -- data communications have just puttered along.
Sitting here at the Interactive Newspapers conference, held Feb. 4-7, I became painfully aware of just how slow the technology for sending bits from one place to another is.
"There are some people who think it’s a question of whether the computer of the 21st century will be the TV set or the TV set of the 21st century will be a computer," said David Carlsen, director of the Interactive Media Lab at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications in Gainesville. Carlsen, who spoke to the crowd on the topic of "'Net TV," basically said that the merging of the Internet and television was inevitable.
Which means that anybody providing any type of interactive content is going to need some pretty heavy-duty bandwidth. Bigger pipes, as they say in the bandwidth business.
I dispatched Correspondent Christopher J. Feola to learn a little more about the issues of bandwidth and what new technologies are hovering on the horizon.
But what I really know is my own internal operation.
When I started The Cole Papers in 1989, I had a computer that ran at 16 megahertz and had 80 megabytes of storage, and I connected to on-line services through a 14,400-bits-per-second modem. Today, the desktop machine speeds along at 200 megahertz, has the aforementioned 5 gigabytes of storage and connects to on-line services at 112,000 bits per second.
So, the increase in processor speed over almost nine years has been 1250 percent. The increase in disk storage has been 6250 percent. The increase in bandwidth has been a piddling 777 percent.
And I've been stuck at the 112,000 bits per second for the last 18 months, patiently waiting for some new technology.
The reason? Web graphics are too slow.
I visit newspaper and magazine web sites dozens of times a day and I can tell you -- the sites are slow. If I were going in at the consumer-access speed of 33,300 bits per second, I think I would turn off graphics, because nine out of 10 publication web sites are just too slow.
I once again remind web site managements: for each kilobyte of web site material (HTML, GIF, JPEG, video, audio), an average user is waiting half a second. So, if the aggregate size of your home page is 120 kilobytes, it’s going to take a user a minute to download it.
And most user surveys say people get impatient at about 30 seconds.
Also inside, you'll find Correspondent L. Carol Christopher’s report on the various new media activities of three of the newspaper industry’s major research and training institutes -- the Freedom Forum, the American Press Institute and the Poynter Institute.
A visit to the annual Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy is also on the agenda. David Galloway, a columnist and writer with Chronicle Interactive, the on-line effort of the Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com/), gives us insight as to how academics are looking at the basic issues of computers, the Internet and Big Brother.
Lastly, I give you my impressions from the Interactive Newspapers conference.
The miracle of the Internet is how quickly it’s being accepted. The miracle of its acceptance is how miserable the experience can be.
We need bigger pipes.
-- David M. Cole
See also Hellbox.
| 