Matrix.Net Declares This Election's Clear Winner is . . . the Internet

Business Wire, Nov 9, 2000

Business/Feature Editors & High-Tech/Government Writers

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 9, 2000

The Nov. 7 election may not have yielded a clear winner yet, but Austin, Texas-based Matrix.Net (www.matrix.net) has declared the real winner to be the Internet.

With more than five million users crowding MSNBC.com and many news Web sites nearly shut down, analysts and users alike feared that record traffic might snap the World Wide Web.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) Web site, for example, experienced such latency (delay) and backlog that it responded to under 1% of the over 1,000 requests in the early morning, and it collapsed completely at 9:10 a.m.

This sort of event appears to substantiate people's fears that the Internet is "creaky" or too delicate to service the explosion of users. However, only Matrix.Net has collected the data to allay these fears.

Matrix.Net Founder and CTO John S. Quarterman explained that, while users may have crowded onto the Web on Election Day, the Internet's infrastructure remained basically undisturbed. "There was a swell (of latency) in the morning, and a peak later in the day; then it drops off," said Quarterman, "which is pretty near perfectly normal."

While the Internet itself withstood the traffic crunch, the real problems actually happened locally, on individual Web servers. Quarterman further noted that this Election Day was a scheduled event, four years in the making. The next flood of Internet traffic won't be so predictable.

This could be a cause for online businesses to worry. "With the holidays coming and shoppers going online in unprecedented numbers, there will be more of a need than ever for companies to monitor the state of the Internet in great detail to anticipate and address any Internet events that could negatively affect their business. Matrix.Net alone can do this."

"This peak season, when Internet traffic is expected to increase over 60%," says CEO Frank Brick, "we'll be watching it 150 million times a day. We'll know what's happening as it happens."

Created in 1990 in Austin, Texas, Matrix.Net is the world's most experienced and skilled provider of Internet performance measurement and intelligence services. Matrix.Net employs unique technology, complex algorithms, and an extensive database of Internet information to provide comprehensive insight into The State of the Internet.

Matrix.Net's beacons scan many destinations across the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These beacons gather over 150 million data points daily, allowing Matrix.Net to detect outages and other performance events throughout the Internet; to isolate event causes; to characterize the nature of events; to analyze events of interest to customers and users; and to interpret information for customers which is of particular relevance to their network and their business.