How much bandwidth do you need? As much as you can get

Cable, DSL, high-speed, T3, bandwidth and broadband are terms that are becoming as common-place as chase, stereotype and Linotype were in the past as the publishing scene converges with the multimedia scene. Gone are the days when dial-up modem connectivity was an adequate way of transmitting and receiving information between newspapers and/or wire services.

Bandwidth -- which is often compared to the diameter of a pipe -- is the term used for the volume of communications that can be moved through a network. For the most part, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. For example, it takes more (higher) bandwidth to download a photograph in one second that it takes to download a page of text in one second. Next in line are sound files and computer programs and animated videos require even more bandwidth for sufficient download performance. And lastly, virtual reality and full-length three-dimensional audio and video presentations require the most bandwidth of all.

When referring to digital systems, bandwidth is expressed as data speed in bits per second (bps), whereas in analog systems, bandwidth is expressed in terms of the difference between the highest- and lowest-frequency signal components. Frequency is measured in the number of cycles of change per second, or hertz. Once upon a not-so-long time ago, communications engineers actually strove to minimize the bandwidths of all signals, while maintaining a minimum acceptable level of system performance -- which was done for two reasons: low-bandwidth signals are less susceptible to noise interference than high-bandwidth signals, and second, low-bandwidth signals allow for a greater number of communications exchanges to take place within a specified band of frequencies. This simplistic rule no longer applies in today's technological world.

According to Jeff Scherb, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Chicago's Tribune Co., the company has greatly enhanced the national scale and scope of its major-market multimedia businesses since last June's acquisition of the Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Co.

AT&T will provide the Tribune -- which encompasses 13 daily newspapers, 22 television stations, four radio stations, two 24-hour cable news channels as well as Tribune Media Services (which now also includes the old Los Angeles Times Syndicate) -- with the necessary platform to facilitate growth and to effectively share content across all these multiple media.

The new system, based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM -- it's a connection-oriented switching technology that uses fixed-length 53-bytes cells for high-speed transmissions), will integrate company-wide telecommunications into a high-speed network that will have significant cost savings and will improve internal operations, including corporate financial applications and technologies, web sites and television station facilities. Scherb said that the new high-speed network offers the flexibility to instantaneously share content across media businesses and transmit high-quality video programming more cost-effectively than satellite transmission.

Through its cable acquisitions of recent years (culminating in the purchase of TeleCommunications Inc. of Denver), AT&T delivers broadband video, voice and data services to customers throughout the United States.

AT&T's Ecosystem for Media is one of several steps the global telecommunications company is taking to leverage its data and Internet infrastructure, digital-media production capabilities and broadband network to develop systems for the evolving media industry. The new ATM system will enable Tribune Broadcasting to run multiple television stations from one facility, replicating the success of Wewb-TV in Albany, N.Y., which is programmed and technically operated out of Wlvi-TV in Boston.

Additionally, Tribune's 22 television stations will be able to transmit, via the network, live video of breaking news or sporting events to all stations, which include Wpix-TV in New York, Ktla-TV in Los Angeles and WGN-TV in Chicago.

44.7 megabits per second
Given all of this new bandwidth information, the key question is "what are newspapers doing to keep up with multimedia technology?"

Stuart Myles, technical manager of the Wall Street Journal, said that to him bandwidth is important in two ways. "One, for the systems that I develop. Two, for the users of my web site." Myles said that bandwidth affects him because of the transfer of data over a network: "I would like to increase the bandwidth, so that the data transfers more quickly," he said. "The alternative is for me to reduce how much data I send, which requires me to do work. Bandwidth is important to the users of my web site because they have to pay more for fatter pipes -- DSL lines are more expensive than dial-up lines."

Myles said that this is particularly acute for users of the web site, who are outside the United States. "Not only do they have to pay more for higher speeds, but they are often paying by the minute for web access."

The Journal is currently using a T3 -- also known as an OC3, the line carries 44.7 megabits per second (mbps) -- connection to the Internet, however, the company has done some work in the past with companies like Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., which has its own worldwide network.

Myles said that the Journal is able to cache some of the web pages, graphics for example, and deliver them directly to the user, which means less of their bandwidth gets used up. "We pay those services by the megabyte transferred, though." According to Myles, you can never have enough bandwidth, "however, if we increase bandwidth, that doesn't make things faster for our users. It just means we can support more users at any given point in time," he said.

The Journal justifies the cost of bandwidth by calculating its various aspects, such as the number of simultaneous users, viewing how many pages, the size of each page (including graphics and scripts) and the speed of which they would like a typical user to view the page (a typical user is on a 56 kilobit per second -- kbps -- modem, less frequently a 28.8 kbps or slower modem). "This gives us the amount of bandwidth we need. And it's based upon what the business defines as the level of service we need to provide," said Myles.

A network may be contained within a building, across town, or across the world. It could be wireless or wired with copper or fiber optics; it could be a private network or the public Internet. Don Oldham, founder and chairman of Digital Technology International (DTI) of Springville, Utah -- whose family also publishes a group of weekly newspapers -- believes bandwidth is important to publishers.

"The importance to publishing is that the amount, the kind and the quality of what can be published depends upon bandwidth," said Oldham. "There is no shortage of bandwidth within buildings or on private networks to most places in the world. The shortage is only on the public Internet."

According to Oldham, the problem with measuring bandwidth is that it is limited to the slowest part of the network: "If a home user can only get connected to the Internet at 28.8 kbps, then it doesn't matter if the whole rest of the Internet, including the publisher and all of the network backbone that carries the data around the world, is running at 100 times that speed. The 'reader' will only be able to receive published information at the low speed." So receiving a publisher's information via the Internet is dependent upon every individual's connection to the network.

In order to take advantage of the ability to send pictures, sound, video, animated graphics and to have on-line interaction with readers, Oldham said, "More total bandwidth is needed. For text only, the current bandwidth is adequate." Not having enough bandwidth limits what can be published. "If text only, or text mostly, is the limit because of bandwidth limitations, then the potential experience that a publisher can create for a reader remains inferior to papers for all but 'instant news.'" In Oldham's opinion, this is not necessarily hurting traditional publishers, however, since this reinforces the idea that print and web together still offers the strongest user experience. "Who it hurts are those publishers, who rely on the Internet alone."

At DTI, bandwidth expenditure on the Internet is seen as vital to exploiting the potential of a direct pipe into a home. However, "I am not aware that the expenditure is paying off for many publishers," he said. "It must be cost-justified as an investment in the future."

One large connection
John Reetz, director of the Atlanta-based CoxNet, which manages a wide area network for Cox Newspapers -- 18 dailies and 21 weeklies -- handles the purchase of bandwidth and the standardization of software throughout the company. He said, "We have a frame-relay connection between all the papers, so we run all of our Internet connections and all of our bandwidth over our internal LAN [Local Area Network]." For backup purposes, CoxNet uses two network systems -- one supplied by Qwest and the other by MCI. The bandwidth connection, which is purchased from Cable and Wireless, wraps through the wide-area network.

Rather than each of the 18 papers having separate connections, CoxNet uses one large connection, Atlanta being the hub of the network. Reetz said, "Atlanta is by far the biggest of the newspapers, so Atlanta uses the most bandwidth -- and that's how we determine our purchasing."

Currently running on a T3 connection, which is priced in the range of $10,000 per month, "We have the ability to scale it up based on need," said Reetz. Does CoxNet share the opinion of the Journal's Myles, that you can never have enough bandwidth? According to Reetz, "Yes, we do [have enough], we bumped it up," about a year or so ago, "with the thought of looking ahead to future growth."

Reetz believes that bandwidth for publishers is a commodity similar to ink and newsprint, "if you're buying bandwidth ... you're buying something tangible that traces back to actually how you get the paper out and the quality and the speed of getting the paper out, too."

He went on to explain that publishers are not buying bandwidth "just so people can play on the Internet," but rather for real commercial reasons. CoxNet saved a reasonable amount of money by purchasing all of its bandwidth at one time, for the entire company, the usage of which is then monitored to determine future bandwidth needs.

Agence France-Presse of Paris, France, or AFP, deals with bandwidth issues in two ways, as it is both a content creator as well as being a content deliverer. Jon Dillon, director of commercial multimedia development at AFP, said that the company has an internal network, via satellite, and an external network link to the Internet. It is working with a 32-mbps connection in the Paris location, while the connection in its Washington, D.C. office is 256-kbps.

Dillon said AFP is quite pleased with the service and "up-time" it currently receives from its bandwidth provider, UUNet.

UUNet UK has recently extended its range of leased line services to incorporate lines running at 8-, 34- and 45-mbps speeds. The 8-mbps service has well over 100 times the capacity of a standard 64-kbps leased line, providing businesses with the bandwidth required for next-generation Internet strategies.

"There are obviously content changes; it puts the squeeze on bandwidth," said Dillon.

He used the crash of Air France's Concorde jet as a prime example of how lack of bandwidth can have a negative affect. AFP hosted a large amount of data from French clients, and with the number of hits to the client web pages, the internal network was completely overloaded causing serious problems.

"We're looking to move into DVB [Digital Video Broadcast, a group of international standards for broadcasting digital video, regardless of transmission method -- satellite or terrestrial] for delivery of data," said Dillon. "I imagine for us, only larger clients will take up on this option," he said, referring to the satellite transmission of the Internet. "We would like very much for there to be more of it [bandwidth], for other people. It kind of holds us back, and not just on the Internet, we're also in the mobile market."

For the time being, Dillon believes that although we talk about "multimedia," the term really should be "bi-media" -- images and text. He said that the service is investigating ways in which to stream video and other images.

One of UUNet UK's first customers for the high-bandwidth services has been the Electronic Telegraph, an on-line version of the Daily Telegraph in London. Now running on a UUNet 8-mbps connection, this increased capacity has both enabled the Telegraph to keep up with the rising demand for its services, and has also enabled them to launch several new services.

Dillon cuts to the bottom line when cost-justifying the expenditure of bandwidth. "There's a need to inform as well as a need to make revenue."

-- Aimee Beck, abeck@colepapers.net

Agence France Presse,
(202) 289-0700,
e-mail: afp-us@afp.com;
Akamai Technologies Inc.,
(617) 250-3000,
e-mail: salesinfo@akamai.com;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 853-5000,
e-mail: dtinfo@dtint.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, December 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.