TRAFFIC THREATENS INTERNET\Expert on overburdened system fears it will soon reach critical\mass.

Byline: Dan Stets Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Time for some straight talk about the Internet. Most people know it is not yet the much touted Information Superhighway, but unfortunately it's beginning more and more to resemble an expressway at rush hour.

The flood of new users, new servers and new sites on the World Wide Web is clogging the arteries of the Internet so much that some analysts fear the whole thing might come crawling to a halt.

One of the most worried observers is Andrew Seybold, an expert on telecommunications and computers, who thinks the Internet might collapse of its own weight.

Seybold is editor of "Outlook on Communications and Computing," a respected industry newsletter. He also is a former vice president and chief computer analyst for Dataquest Inc., a well-known market research firm.

Seybold says there are now 110,000 Web sites and that people are trying to send a huge amount of graphics, voice and even video over a system which was never designed for such traffic.

"It was designed as a federal government and university-type network," he says. "It is a self-propagating type network that has no management per se. Nobody is in charge."

Even with the fastest modems available to most computer users, ones that moves data at a relatively fast 28.8 baud, images are downloaded at a rate which is "painfully slow," he says.

Things have gotten to the point where there are what Seybold calls "brownouts," a term borrowed from the electric power industry to designate periods where the flow of electricity is slowed but not stopped.

E-mail communications which used to take 10 minutes can now take six hours or even a full day to arrive. He says a year ago, he visited the Microsoft site on the Web and it took him 10 minutes to connect and download. Now it can take 45 minutes or more.

"I think you are going to get longer and longer delays until it is useless to the people who want it to be useful," he says. When that happens, the current rush to be part of the Internet will stop.

"I would never use the Net for any critical mission or business related activity and count on it," he says.

He predicts the Internet is going to "crash and burn" and from the ashes will emerge a real Information Superhighway but he is not quite sure what form that will take other than that it will have to be much wider - have much more bandwidth in computer jargon - to meet the growing demand.

Bandwidth is a measure of how much information can flow over a line during a certain period. The present Internet system, using telephone connections from individual users and dedicated phone lines between servers, is a cow path compared to what the future promises.

Some Internet proponents hope for connections such as fiber optic cable which would allow hundreds of times more data, even full length-films, to speed through the system. But installing such a system nationwide would cost hundreds of billions of dollars which no one is now volunteering to spend.

Seybold, who now publishes his newsletter from Boulder Creek, Calif., is a native of Swarthmore, Pa., and almost affectionately remembers the Schuylkill that runs through Philadelphia as the "Surekill Crawlway."

In the same sense, he thinks there will be lots of "roadkill" along the Internet as long as it exists in its present, narrow path. Some now popular sites and services will not survive, especially as they begin to charge users.

Many of the sites on the World Wide Web are very popular when they are first introduced, but then the number of people visiting them - measured through "hits" - goes down dramatically.

He points to what was once one of the most popular sites on the Web, the ESPN sports site. The number of "hits" on the site has fallen dramatically since ESPN began charging for visits.

Seybold is not alone in his pessimism. International Data Corp. says in a new report that after a year of intoxicating growth in 1995, the Internet is due for a hangover in 1996.

The Internet's very popularity could bring the system to its knees in the coming year, says Frank Gens, vice president of International Data, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass.

Both businesses and new users rushing to the Internet in the coming year are in for some disappointments, Gens says.

About one-third of the Fortune 500 companies now have home pages or sites on the World Wide Web, but by the end of 1996, two-thirds of the companies will have their own pages, he predicts.