Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994 TAG: 9402180092
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES COATES CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Long
"You're never alone
"When you hear that modem tone"
That's generally true still, but hearing the distinctive bleep-blurp modem sound that says you're on-line is no longer a guarantee of instant access to interactive communications.
Yesteryear's wide-open electronic frontier has become an on-line megalopolis sometimes locked in virtual traffic jams - gridlock in cyberspace.
And you can blame cyberhype for today's cyberlock.
The increasingly meaningless phrase "information superhighway" has become the mother of all cliches even as teeming millions more rush to join the crowds on-line.
I am as guilty as any of the other on-line evangelists in this digital drumbeating.
Suddenly, however, we're learning that the same thing happens in cyberspace that happens in regular space when things get crowded. Things slow down. Traffic cops are needed. Nerves get frayed.
Ask the poor souls who try to log on to America Online during peak traffic hours and trigger the hugely successful service's new automated hang-up-on-the-caller feature designed to limit the number of people using AOL's machines at any one time.
Ask the folk who get on-line with CompuServe, type something like "go graphics" and hit the return key and then sit there wondering if they should hit "return" again when nothing happens because the service's computers are handling requests from thousands of other users at the same time.
Ask the new users of the Delphi Internet service who finally find the coveted address for downloading a wonderful file at some obscure university's minicomputer only to be told something like "host connection failed, too many calls."
Ask the Chicagoans who dial up the GEnie service and get absolutely no response when the connection is made.
But don't ask Brian Ek, spokesman for Prodigy Services Inc., the largest of the on-line services. Executives say they have more than enough computing power there to take all the customers they can get and then some.
Ek is unhappy, and rightly so, that Prodigy is getting lumped together with other services on this question of gridlock.
The fact is that Prodigy is partly owned by International Business Machines Corp. and thus uses massive mainframe computing power that makes it immune to the crowding problem, says Ek.
Elsewhere, particularly at America Online, demand is booming beyond computing power, causing slowdowns. And, as America Online's Steve Case hinted a couple of days ago in a phone interview, they're about to get worse.
Just before Christmas, America Online had about 500,000 subscribers, putting it in third place behind CompuServe, with 1.5 million members, and Prodigy, with more than 2 million.
In the next 30 days or so, America Online's membership jumped to 600,000 as Americans took their new computers out of the boxes and figured out how to work the modems and the free software for America Online or other services that was included with millions of the machines.
Of 11 million personal computers made in the United States last year by companies that sell to both home and business customers, 6 million went into home use, according to figures from Channel Marketing Corp. Virtually every one of those 6 million consumer machines came equipped with a modem, and most included signup deals for one or more of the competing services, which must beef up their communications and computing assets in a hurry to meet the rush.
Case said America Online is doing that by hiring more programmers, more machines and more telephone equipment to accommodate expected growth. He added that AOL anticipates 1 million subscribers by the end of this year, if not sooner.
Because Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, owns about 10 percent of AOL and sponsors the Chicago Online service there, I spend a lot of time on it. Like others, I have noticed that things get maddeningly slow during peak periods, roughly between 9 p.m. and midnight.
To speed things up, Case made the dangerous decision of issuing a public admission that the service was glutted.
He changed the software to include a traffic-cop feature. Once the maximum number of people get on-line, other callers are turned away.
Case refused to say what that maximum number is, because he said it would give the competition information he doesn't want them to have. Technical folk elsewhere estimate AOL's capacity at about 10,000 simultaneous users.
You'll know you've been bounced if your AOL software tells you that you're connected but then initiates an automatic redial instead of checking your password. Usually if you try four or five times you'll get on.
Which brings us back to Prodigy's Ek, who said that because of the enormous investment that IBM and its partner, Sears, Roebuck and Co., put into Prodigy when they set it up in 1985, there is virtually no limit to how many users it can serve at once.
The system, which was rumored to have cost $1 billion to create, includes IBM mainframes in White Plains, N.Y., and banks of minicomputers in 214 cities and towns nationwide, all connected with high-speed telephone lines. It was designed to handle 40 million callers, Ek said.
This is far larger than AOL or even CompuServe, which runs on computers owned by H&R Block Inc., the income tax preparation giant in Ohio.
Prodigy, which because of its enormous capital investment has posted losses every quarter since it opened, will show its first profit this quarter, Ek predicted. It will gain at AOL's expense, he added.
Case countered that AOL soon will solve its access problem and that its growth will soar while Prodigy's stays flat.
"It's a matter of supply and demand," he said. "They have the supply but not much demand. We have demand and not enough supply. At the end of the day I'd rather have too much demand than too much supply."
(Computer writer James Coates can be reached via the internet at jcoates1(at)aol.com.)
by CNB