Building A Faster Internet.(The Technologist)(dynamic-circuit network technology)

Byline: Karen Pinchin

A conductor in Tokyo moves his baton, and an orchestra in Cleveland starts to play. A few bars later, a violinist in Berlin joins in. To compensate for a slight delay, the musicians play along with an electronic metronome. The performance is broadcast on high-fidelity speakers and high-definition television. Such a musical experiment would be challenging enough for a television network to pull off; over the Internet, it would be impossible.

That may soon change. Engineers are developing a new type of Internet connection called a dynamic-circuit network that could carry so much data so quickly it might startle even Net surfers in Japan or South Korea. If all goes to plan, the vast data speeds required for such a collaboration may soon be available to all. That might go a long way to solving the problem of how to handle the enormous growth in Internet traffic, which by some estimates is doubling each year.

When a digital photo, YouTube clip or live streaming video is sent over the Internet, the data is first divided into packets, which are routed to the destination and then reassembled. This method tends to break down when large amounts of information are sent along similar pathways at the same time--the different packets are prone to getting hung up on bottlenecks. The result is a Web page that crashes or an online videoconference that sputters and skips. As the Internet starts to stagger under the weight of more and more data, such problems are increasingly common.

Dynamic-circuit network technology would solve the bottleneck problem by opening up a dedicated route from one point to another through which data can be sent without interruption, at speeds thousands of times faster than what's possible now. Just as quickly, the pathway can be closed and space made available for the next connection. The technology would require some ...