MOST READERS of this column, I suspect, don't have time to read a lot of IT (information technology) insider newsletters, reports, and so on. Since I spend a day or two a week reading this kind of material, I thought I would share with you some of the more interesting and sometimes disturbing things I've read recently. Despite the downturn in the economy in the last quarter of 2001, the Internet did not seem to be affected: it just kept on growing exponentially. Here are some recent figures from NetworkWorld. The number of host computers connected to the Internet rose to 137 million last year, up 40% over the 97 million reported in December 2000. It is interesting to note that about half of the three billion documents indexed by Google are corporate pages, and that proportion is expected to grow. Thus when students surf the Web, half of what they see is generated by a corporation, not by an educational organization. Maybe we need to add required courses such as Media Literacy and Knowledge Work to the curriculum. At the very least we need to help our students understand that they need to consider the source. Traffic on the U.S. portion of the Internet backbone rose to over 55 pentabytes (a pentabyte is a million gigabytes) per month, more than double the 23 pentabytes recorded in January 2001. (Supposedly one pentabyte equals 20 million four-drawer file cabinets filled with text. I wonder who figured this out?) In addition, the number of U.S. adults connected to the Internet rose 5% last year, with 62% now connecting to the Internet at least three times in the past three months. I find this last figure hard to believe, and I am still trying to digest it. I suspect it means that the Internet is becoming a mass medium, like television or radio. The rapid growth in the number of connected servers, in the amount of content available, and in the number of users is creating technological and economic headaches for education IT departments. Consider Oregon State University, for example, which has 22,000 students and employees and supports them with two leased DS-3 lines that provide a combined bandwidth of 90 Mbit/sec. Even at that, the university has to restrict inbound Internet traffic to 22 Mbit/sec. Internet connections of this kind cost more than $300,000 per year, and that is only for the connection -- not for all the hardware, software, and people needed to maintain it. School districts with a similar number of students and employees face even worse problems, since their schools are spread out over large geographical areas. Most moderately sized school districts probably have Internet connections in the 1-10 Mbit/sec. range and desperately need more bandwidth. E-rate funding (federal subsidies to schools for Internet access) has helped some, but much more needs to be done to support school and district connectivity. It varies widely, but my guess is that it takes a budget category of about one to five times the cost of the Internet connection to support it with people and equipment. So, even if the government gives you the money for your Internet connection, you still have to use large sums of local money to support it. If people only wanted to use the Internet for text-based traffic, such as e-mail and reading text-based Web pages, life would be simple. But such is not the case. People are beginning to expect the Internet to be a multimedia medium that supports voice calls (voice-over IP [Internet protocol]), instant messaging, videoconferencing, streaming video on demand, and MP3 music. Since the Internet was not designed for such things and since these kinds of uses take massive amounts of bandwidth, we've got problems -- big ones. One of the biggest problems facing the Internet community is multimedia instant messaging (IM). I didn't realize that IM or Internet chat was so popular until I polled 100 or so of my university students: more than three-quarters said they used IM daily. …
