IP: Japan Watches Olympics and Wonders About Internet Demise

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 16:39:45 +0900
To: farber () central cis upenn edu
From: sja () glocom ac jp (Stephen J. Anderson)


In an effort to measure impacts of the Olympics, staff here at Tokyo's Center 
for Global Communications (GLOCOM) have been watching the main servers for
the Atlanta Games and using traceroute software to test the impact on cross-
Pacific Internet connections.  Are there any systematic studies on-going?


We are trying to pool efforts, and our various attempts to enter the main
servers of 
IBM (http://www.atlanta.olympic.org/) as well as CNN (http://www.cnn.com/) were
sometimes timed out because the servers appeared busy.


As for other sites, we saw no major differences in gaining access to the
White House, 
UCLA, Georgia Tech, or MIT which our staff used to see if broad differences
in speed of
connections might appear.  One researcher here, Tad Kimura, worked up a
table from
Monday 6 AM JST (which is 2 PM PDT or 5 PM EDT) and found difficulties only
with the 
sites in Atlanta--IBM and CNN. 


However, I personally have had no trouble all weekend, and watched various
sites such as
the opening ceremony images in the gallery of CNN.  MSNBC seems to have some
startup
problems, and dislikes browsers other than Microsoft Explorer--I stopped
watching--but
my big surprises were the good local paper coverage by the Atlanta
Constitution (http://atlantagames.com) among other papers--my Pennsylvania
roots also led me to find that the 
Philadelphia Inquirer is supporting a page with links to other contributing
papers (http://wh002.infi.net/phillynews/olympics/).


My question to others--what systematic studies are on-going to watch the
impact of the 
Atlanta Olympics?  At the moment, I think all the concerns were much
over-blown, and 
the Web is making my combination of televised events and personal interest
in details 
about the soccer venues (US-Argentina with 80,000 and Japan's shocking win
over Brazil)
all the more convenient.  Rather than a demise, I think the Olympics will be
a boost to the
compelling evidence that the Web is here to stay.


****************************************
Stephen J. Anderson
URL http://www.glocom.ac.jp/staff/anderson.e.html
Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM)
International University of Japan
****************************************