You've Come A Long Way, Baby Kent Jenkins, Jr., spokesman for Cisco systems, says the Net is a much different beast than it was just two years ago and he points to the very different architecture being used today to support the Net today. The Victoria's Secret cyber fashion show crashed before its approximately 1.5 million ogling eyes. Today, Web sites tend to spread their content among servers that are physically scattered across the nation and the world, even. With this new architecture, if someone in New York tries to access a site run out of California, the connection doesn't necessarily have to go all the way across the country to access the site. Instead, it could access servers in the Empire State or another nearby area if the New York servers are too overloaded.
Smart routers can help direct the traffic to be geographically friendly.
But this new Internet infrastructure might not help the situation in Florida. Connolly cites money as a potential hurdle, as well. Because they're a government agency, their budget doesn't have the kind of ability to go out and get a big pipe. But Internet experts add a window of hope to the discussion and say the very nature of the Net could save the Florida high court Web site from a crash and burn situation. Prince and Connolly say getting information out through other channels is a reasonable way to minimize impact on the site.