Traditional Internet Applications

Traditional Internet Applications

Traditional Internet applications are called elastic applications because they can work without guarantees of timely delivery. Because they can stretch in the face of greater delay, they can still perform adequately, even when the network faces increased congestion and degradation in performance. The following are the most widely used elastic applications:

         E-mail The most widely used of the Internet applications, generating several gigabytes of traffic per month, is e-mail. Because there is a standardized convention for the e-mail address username@domainname various companies can interoperate to support electronic messaging.

         Telnet Telnet is one of the original ARPANET applications. It enables remote login to another computer that's running a Telnet server and allows you to run applications present on that computer, with their outputs appearing in the window on your computer.

         File Transfer Protocol (FTP) FTP allows file transfers to and from remote hosts. That is, you can use FTP to download documents from a remote host onto your local device.

         The World Wide Web Key aspects that identify the Web are the use of the uniform resource locator (URL) and the use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) the client/server hypermedia system that enables the multimedia point-and-click interface. HTTP provides hyperlinks to other documents, which are encoded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), providing a standardized way of displaying and viewing information contained on servers worldwide. Web browsers are another important part of the Web environment they interpret the HTML and display it, along with any images, on the user's local computer. The ease of using the Web popularized the use of URLs, which are available for just about any Internet service. (The URL is the syntax and semantics of formalized information for location and access of resources via the Internet. URLs are used to locate resources by providing an abstract identification of the resource location.)

So, how are people actually using the Internet? Greenfield Online conducts polls online. In November 2000, Greenfield Online (www.greenfieldonline.com) reported that the Internet was being used as follows:

         98% of Internet users went online to check their e-mail.

         80% of Internet users were checking for local information, such as movie schedules, weather updates, or traffic reports.

         66% of Internet users were looking for a site that provided images and sounds.

         66% of Internet users wanted to shop at sites that provided images of the products they were interest in.

         53% of Internet users downloaded some form of a large file.

         37% of Internet users listened to Internet radio.

This shows that increasingly there is interest in imagery, multimedia, and entertainment-type aspects of the Internet. These are advanced real-time applications that are highly sensitive to timely data delivery. Therefore, any application that includes VoIP, audio streaming, video streaming, or interactive multimedia needs to be addressed by the administration of Quality of Service (QoS). The lack of control over QoS in the public Internet is preventing the deployment of these new applications at a more rapid pace.

Today's flat-rate pricing for Internet access is compatible with the Internet's lack of service differentiation, and it is partially responsible for that structure as well. The main appeal of a flat-rate pricing scheme is its simplicity. It means predictable fees for the users, and it means providers can avoid the administrative time and cost associated with tracking, allocating, and billing for usage. It also gives companies known expectations for payments, facilities planning, and budgeting. However, as QoS emerges within the Internet, the ability to differentiate services will result in differentiated pricing, thereby allowing revenue-generating service levels and packages and that's extremely important. As we've discussed several times so far in this book, developments in optical networking and in wireless networking are providing more and more bandwidth. Hence, the cost the cents per minute that you can charge for carrying traffic is being reduced. If network operators are going to continue to make money in the future, they will need to do so through the administration of value-added services, differentiated performance, and tiered pricing. Therefore, the QoS aspect is very important to the materialization of new revenue-generating services.

Key applications from which service providers are expected to derive revenues include e-commerce, videoconferencing, distance learning and education networks, Webcasting, multiplayer gaming, unified messaging, call centers, interactive voice response, and IP-based centrex systems. Evolving next-generation networks such as VPNs, VoIP and Packet over IP, streaming audio and video, multimedia collaboration, network caching, application hosting, location-based online services, software downloads, and security services are introducing a variety of Class of Service (CoS) and QoS differentiators.