http://news.excite.com/news/zd/991020/12/report-warns-of SAN FRANCISCO -- Internet performance is too low to support serious transactional business by ASPs, and trends indicate that improvements may be inadequate over the next several years, a recent study has found. Northeast Consulting Resources Inc., of Boston, reports that the growing complexity of Web pages and increased network delays will reverse improvements in Internet performance built over the last four years. The findings are bad news for application service providers, which promise to deliver enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications. "When the ASP applications come, the time of reckoning will appear," Peter Sevcik, an analyst for NCRI, said earlier this month at the 1999 Global Internet Performance Conference here. Router runaround NCRI says technology improvements have cut the average download time of basic business Web pages from 12 seconds to 6 seconds since 1995, a significant drop despite a 120 percent increase in page size. However, those improvements may not be sustainable over the next three years because overall delays within the Internet have become significantly higher, due primarily to the increasing number of routers. More routers are added as sites deploy additional hardware to provide more scalability. The increasing number of router hops imposed upon data could deteriorate availability to about 9 seconds, the study found. NCRI based its study on data provided by Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., Web performance research company that publishes the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index, an industry benchmark based on the performance and reliability of 40 leading business Web sites. Keynote announced here at the conference the Keynote Consumer 40 Internet Performance Index, which will be based on the performance of 40 consumer Web sites accessed through a 56K-bps modem. Indexes also will be available for digital subscriber line and cable modems, and the whole package will be sold as the Keynote Consumer Perspective service, which will be available later this quarter, company officials said. Pricing was not yet available.