November 2, 1998
Network necessities for next-generation I-commerce: It's more than just bandwidth
Ralph ungermann first made a name in the computer business as a co-founder of Ungermann-Bass, maker of the first commercial network interface card (NIC). That NIC helped to start the LAN revolution. Now Ungermann is trying to one-up himself by supplying the infrastructure for the next evolutionary leap in networking: the Next-Generation Internet (NGI).
Ungermann, who is CEO of FVC.com, wants you to be able to hold virtual teleconferences, browse interactive video merchandise displays, and engage in other bandwidth-hungry Internet activities from your desktop PC. To facilitate that, FVC.com sells tools that enable video applications over IP networks. (See www.fvc.com for more information.)
FVC.com is also throwing its weight behind the NGI initiative, a broad-based effort to increase the bandwidth of the Internet from 100 to 1,000 times its current capacities.
"The NGI is much further along than anybody knows," Ungermann told me recently in FVC.com's Spartan Silicon Valley offices. There are 50 million PCs that currently have network connections with enough bandwidth to support two-way interactive video, he said. But the NGI is not just videoconferencing -- its implications for I-commerce are huge.
Building the next Net
Business-to-consumer e-commerce has also been around for about two decades. One of the earliest efforts to conduct business online was The Source, a commercial online service started in 1979.
Strictly speaking, the NGI is a research program funded by several federal government agencies. (For more on the NGI and the related Internet2 project, see "Road work ahead," Oct. 26, page IW2/33.)
But in Ungermann's view, the NGI encompasses any technology that increases existing IP network capacity by several orders of magnitude. Whether that's a company upgrading its LAN to Gigabit Ethernet or an ISP building a new international ATM backbone, it falls under the rubric of NGI infrastructure building. The only qualifications are that the new broadband technology must be based on IP, and it must provide quality of service (QOS) guarantees in order to deliver reliable voice, video, and data streams.
The process is already starting with corporate and educational intranets. Subsequent work will involve building high-bandwidth connections among these intranets. The last piece of the puzzle, Ungermann told me, will happen when bandwidth to the home undergoes similarly exponential growth.
Commerce in the fast lane
The impact of this added bandwidth on Internet commerce is obvious: With fat pipes all the way to the customer's home, merchants will be able to enhance their commerce sites with interactive video, voice, and other multimedia bells and whistles that may stimulate sales.
The addition of QOS guarantees will also precipitate a mind shift in the way consumers think about Internet services.
Currently, home users pay $20 or less per month for unlimited, unreliable access to the Internet. They're often unwilling to pay more for access to content, unless it has a demonstrable value. With a QOS infrastructure in place, companies and individuals will be able to pay extra for guaranteed connectivity.
An online stock trading site, for instance, might offer premium customers guaranteed access to the site. Such customers could make trades no matter how thick the traffic got on the public Internet. During a stock market boom or crash, this could be invaluable.
As consumers get accustomed to paying for different levels of Internet service, a number of things will happen. First, the quality of the connection will become part of every online company's overall presentation.
Second, consumers will get used to the idea of paying as they go for quality Internet access. From that point, it's a short step to pay-per-view content, entertainment, and more.
And with the NGI's added bandwidth in place, Internet content might finally be something worth paying for.
Corrections department
In a recent column ("Commerce-enabled Web sites will lead a business revolution," Oct. 12, page 46), I incorrectly stated that Ironside provides procurement software. In fact, Ironside provides sell-side tools for business-to-business commerce.
Dylan Tweney (dylan@infoworld.com)
has been covering the Internet since 1993. He
edits InfoWorld's intranet and Internet-commerce
product reviews.
Previous
columns by Dylan Tweney
Electronic commerce has come a long way in the past 20 years.
October 26, 1998
Everyone's making up markup languages for fun and profit
October 19, 1998
Commerce-enabled Web sites will lead a business revolution
October 12, 1998
Commerce-enabled Web sites will lead a business revolution
October 12, 1998
Delivering the bits is only half the battle in Net software sales
October 5, 1998
Every column since August, 1997
