It is not yet clear whether the use of multimedia documents will be confined to certain restricted application areas, or whether their use will become widespread. Progress in other areas is also tending to increase the traffic on computer networks. There has been a steady growth in the number of processor cycles devoted worldwide to numerical calculation. The increasing use of modeling and simulation in engineering and in science contributes to this trend.

The results of such calculations, often displayed in graphical form, constitute an increasing amount of the traffic carried by computer networks. The growing use of automatic methods for acquiring data is similarly leading to new traffic. NASA, working with various other space agencies, has announced plans for putting up an Earth Orbiting System (EOS), comprising a group of satellite sensors.

By the mid 2005 these will begin to send an alarming amount of data to the earth every second. It is likely that in future advances in telecommunications, the use of optical fibers in particular, will provide plenty of bandwidth for traditional computer networking with its emphasis on resource sharing. The bandwidth exchange networks we now have are designed for this sort of traffic, in which the slick handling of short messages is of paramount importance. However, there is likely to be a major growth of bulk data traffic, arising from the activities of the supercomputing world, from NASA, and from similar sources.

The current computer networks were not designed for document traffic and, if this is allowed to flood in, the networks will become useless for their original purpose. The solution will be to build, alongside the existing networks, new networks optimized for bulk data, not all of which will be closely related to computers. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that optical fibers will provide enough bandwidth for both types of network, provided that junk data does not grow to major proportions.

Aponet, Inc., a leading provider of network traffic and bandwidth management tools today announced the availability of Aponet Bandwidth-Manager(TM). Bandwidth-Manager is a hardware and software solution that allows ISPs to proactively allocate appropriate bandwidth among competing sources and charge web site hosting customers according to their actual bandwidth usage. Strategically, real-time and historical bandwidth data is critical for forecasting network traffic growth and future bandwidth resource planning, as well as to ensure customer satisfaction and quality of service.

As the competition heats up among Internet Service Providers, many are differentiating themselves by emphasizing their offering of web site hosting services. At the same time, more companies are outsourcing their web site hosting to their ISPs. This has the potential to be very lucrative for ISPs. Understandably, customers are demanding service guarantees and until now, ISPs had no way of provisioning bandwidth among these customers regardless of whether they were on a dedicated or shared-server service.