This document provides an overview of how data is "routed" (flows over) the Internet, and the effect this has on your ability to access WebCom.

Data sent from WebCom goes through a number of different areas before it arrives at your computer. At any point in the chain of connections between your site and WebCom, there could be a problem affecting your ability to access WebCom with the highest level of performance possible.

Web Communications has a high speed connection to the Internet, which provides WebCom servers with high speed access to the national Internet backbone. At this moment, the WebCom server is experiencing only a moderate level of traffic, and much of the potential bandwidth is unused. We are committed to continually upgrading this connection in order to maintain the highest level of performance possible.

Even with WebCom's high speed connectivity, you may still occasionally experience problems connecting or slow access speeds, due to the design and structure of the Internet.

Data flowing onto the Internet from individual sites can be seen as similar to cars attempting to access a busy highway: traffic jams can occur at street level on the way to the "highway" (or "backbone" as it is called), backups can accumulate at the on and off-ramps, and slowdowns can occur (much less often than on "real" highways) on the road itself. On top of this, the "traffic flow" engineers are often busy doing "road work" (configuring "routers", which tell "traffic" where to go). This sometimes leads to traffic going in circles and never getting anywhere.

The Internet is barely 20 years old, and while it has been constantly expanding during its entire existence, the scope and scale of recent expansion is somewhat unexpected, and has put a tremendous strain on the ability of the network providers to keep up with it.

The rate at which traffic on the Internet is increasing, has forced Internet providers of all types, from local companies (such as the one you may be using to access the Internet) to major corporations (such as MCI and Sprint, two of the companies building the national "backbone" (or Information Interstate) through which our access to the Internet is provided) to continually upgrade and improve their equipment and software. Inevitably, there are glitches in this process, the effect of which is compounded by the rate of growth and relative immaturity of the technology.

Telephone and other "information" services have had a lot longer to evolve stable architectures, and have never had to cope with the volume and complexity of the information flowing over the Internet. As the various Internet providers gain experience with the technology, and develop improved hardware and software, these problems can be expected to occur less and less frequently.

We appreciate your concern/frustration at the occasional inability of you and/or your visitors to access WebCom; however, problems do occur and the ability of WebCom to deal with them is limited to resolving the source and informing the company in question of what is occurring. Please note that when a major national access provider has problems, they are typically resolved within a few hours.

Investigations of past comments and feedback concerning inability to access WebCom (other than when the WebCom server has been down for maintenance) and/or slow connection times have nearly always revealed a "routing" problem or network outage somewhere between WebCom and the site being used to access the Internet by the person in question. As well, a number of users have commented that their access speeds increased noticeably, after they dropped accounts with overburdened access providers and changed to relatively less burdened ones.