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Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

--Mark Twain, in a cable from London to the Associated Press

It's axiomatic that at any given time, someone somewhere on the Net is predicting its imminent demise. If it's not the apocryphal modem tax (a rumor that recycles around the Net about as often as Dave Barry's column on the beached whale they blew up in Oregon or the long-since recovered Craig Shergold's dying request for business cards), it's death by regulation, mismanagement, or lack of bandwidth, the measure of how much data can flow across a connection at a time.

High bandwidth means lots of data; video and audio that a user can interact with in real time, that is, instantaneously, are high-bandwidth applications. Barry's text column is small, a page or so of text taking up only a few kilobytes of computer memory or disk storage space; the three-minute video clip of the Oregon TV news coverage of the exploding whale takes up 11.7 megabytes, enough memory or disk space to hold twenty-three copies of this entire book, and demands a lot of bandwidth if you want to be able to watch it as if your PC and the Internet were a giant broadcasting system. When, in 1994, I retrieved the file via FTP, it took more than an hour to transmit to my computer.

Bandwidth (and where more of it is going to come from) is intimately bound up with the political and legal questions of equal access. The key issue is who is going to pay for it. A growing lobby is claiming that the Internet's cooperative structure can't work in a future of high-bandwidth applications such as real-time voice and video, and that the Net will shortly be swamped by its own success if it doesn't "grow up" and adopt a pricing structure that more accurately reflects the costs of expansion.

One of the more vocal members of this group is networking company 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, the world's most popular local area networking standard, and now a columnist for Info World. In his acceptance speech for the Electric Frontier Foundation's 1996 Pioneer award for his inventions, Metcalfe hit the assembled Net lovers at the 1996 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference with a shocking prediction: the Internet would start to collapse in 1996. Quizzed a little more closely, he modified this statement. It wouldn't exactly collapse, but it would start experiencing the network equivalent of the blackouts and brownouts the power grid sees when it gets overloaded. In the ensuing months, when Netcom and America Online (AOL) both experienced major downtimes (AOL for more than nineteen hours one day in August), a lot of people took that as evidence that he was right.

But these networks are not the Internet; they are just some of the many networks attached to the Internet. AOL later attributed its long outage to configuration errors: the service was installing high-capacity switches within its local area network when its network access provider, ANS, misconfigured routing information destined for AOL. Because the entire system was down, the diagnostic systems that might have caught the error were not in place, and it took many hours for technicians to identify what was wrong and reconfigure the routers.[1] Members were given a free hour on the service in compensation, but as many commentators pointed out, if you had come to depend on email, a free hour on the service doesn't go any distance at all in recompensing you for a day's lost work.

However, it is probably accurate to say that AOL's problem might not have happened in an earlier era, when its system was smaller and updates and tweaks could be done by hand. It certainly would have mattered less with fewer people dependent on the service specifically and email in general. In the automated system now necessary because of the service's size, no one knew what had happened. A couple of months earlier, Netcom was out for five hours with, reportedly, a similar problem. These stories also highlighted how many points of failure there are for Internet connections, which depend on the electricity supply and telephone connections, as well as the reliability of the Internet service providers (ISPs) on both ends of the correspondence.

In a paper presented at MIT in September 1996, research affiliate Sharon Eisner Gillett and Lotus founder and E F F co-founder Mitch Kapor examined the