Increased traffic threatens to clog lanes on the Net. But technology in the works promises to open up the highway. What if you could reserve a spot on the highway for your morning commute? Or better yet, take a private elevated expressway above the traffic, directly to your destination? Wouldn't it be nice to take a similar route with your Internet connection? Imagine: your own pipeline, for as long as you need it.

Pipe dream? Not for long, according to vendors and industry experts, who say the pieces are falling into place to allow ISPs (Internet service providers) to offer new bandwidth-broadband services to corporate Internet users. Sometimes called quality of service or bandwidth reservation, this kind of service essentially will enable corporate Internet users to notify their ISP of their future bandwidth needs--and get a guaranteed fat pipe when they need it. And they are certainly going to need it as new interactive voice, videoconferencing and collaborative document applications and extensive World Wide Web searches jack up corporate demand for network bandwidth.

You're only as fast as your weakest link, notes a senior analyst at The Yankee Group Inc., a consultancy in Boston. While much of the Internet backbone itself is constructed of super-speedy ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) links, the weak link is usually the one between the corporate LAN and the Internet access point: "That's the brick wall," he says. Reservations, please.

One quality of service offering soon to be offered comes from BBN Planet Corp., an ISP in Cambridge, Mass. BBN's service allows users of high-bandwidth applications, like multimedia, to say to us, Give me a 384K pipe for 1 hour between 2 and 3 p.m. for my videoconference, informs the service line manager at BBN. Commercial deployment of BBN's quality of service offering to corporate customers is slated for early 2007.

The technology that makes this kind of service possible centers on a protocol called, appropriately, RSVP--Resource Reservation Protocol. Developed initially by a group of Internet devotees at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, RSVP, currently in the draft stage of approval with the Internet Engineering Task Force, is designed for both individual transmissions and to efficiently scale up to group broadcasts via multicasts.

The protocol works by allowing RSVP-enabled applications to request a bandwidth reservation from its host PC, which passes the request upstream to the RSVP-equipped routers along the information path, providing an end-to-end reservation. Full approval as a standard is expected this summer. The more quickly RSVP is incorporated into such technologies as routers and Internet applications, the faster the dream of reserved bandwidth on demand can be realized, says BBN's Blatt.

One large boost: Cisco has announced it will incorporate RSVP in its IOS (Internet Operating System) Level 2, to be released in September, and other networking companies are expected to follow suit. The Internet community also is designing the next-generation Internet protocols--the RTP (Real Time Transport Protocol)--to support the demanding needs of transmitting multimedia and other real-time data.