I wish this here Internet phenomenon would hurry up and sort itself out. Any day now, prices are supposed to plummet and available bandwidth is supposed to approach infrared frequencies. Or so I'm told. Right now, I'm mostly experiencing chaos. And from what I hear from various friends and associates, I'm not alone.
For example, I got one of those neat ISDN router boxes to connect my LAN to the Internet. It can dial on demand, making a phone call in a fraction of a second. It adaptively turns on the second B channel so I just pay for the bandwidth I need at the moment. It hangs up the phone when the packets stop flowing for a long enough time, again saving on connect time. Or so the theory goes.
In practice, my Internet service provider (ISP) takes anywhere between 30 and 90 seconds to validate each call. So much for rapid ISDN dialing. I get billed, by both the phone company and the ISP, for the connect time while waiting for that go-ahead. Because of those long delays, I've had to stretch out the idle timeout. So each brief phone call costs three times what it should. The result so far has been staggering monthly bills for Internet access not much better, on average, than I could get with a V.34 analog modem at a tenth the price.
It doesn't help that most network software is apparently written by people with dedicated Internet access. They certainly treat it as a free commodity. The net effect is that the mail services I use, and even the Windows95 network drivers, feel free to generate all sorts of TCP/IP traffic on a whim. I have a teenager in the house who costs less, at least for phone services.
Our first Web site was cheap, but it turned out to be in a low-bandwidth ghetto seldom visited by those Web crawlers who get you into the important indexes. The only usage statistics we got were ones we gathered ourselves. So we paid thrice as much per month to move closer to the Information Interstate. That was fine, until we asked for the power to make secure transactions. Whoever prices Internet services has sure guessed wrong about what this particular traffic will bear.
My neighbors in Chelmsford, Mass. can now get 300 KB dedicated Internet access over cable for about sixty bucks a month. I live within long cannon shot of them but can't hope for similar service for about another year. Different cable company. Grumpf.
On the plus side, we make good use out of the Internet every single day. We ship manuals and software to customers via e-mail and FTP. We download megabytes in minutes that used to ride a diskette overnight on a FedEx airplane. We advertise to good effect and check out the competition via the World Wide Web. The addiction is firmly entrenched. Now all we need is a good connection.
P.J. Plauger