CIDR, Sprint and the Big guys.

Sun Apr 7 01:03:07 UTC 1996

On Saturday, April 06, 1996 5:55 PM, Jeff Young[SMTP:young at mci.net] wrote:
@you know, 
@
@i wish that i knew what any of you guys were talking about.
@it gives me no end of amusement to listen to people postulate
@about how we run our network.  SNR is getting pretty high
@in this discussion.  it's beginning to sound more like a gossip
@session than a discussion group.
@
@Jeff Young
@young at mci.net
@

In my opinion, the world is rapidly moving to a maturity where levels of
service and performance will be tracked, evaluated, analyzed, etc.
This will be part of the agreement(s) between the various participants.

I believe that most people up and down the Internet "food chain", just
want solid, reliable, secure service....for low cost...:-)

Because of the nature of the Internet, we all live in "Flatland" (a great
book by the way). There is no concept of "up and down" and hierarchies
are difficult to form. Instead, flat triangles are formed. It is sometimes
hard to see this world because there is no third dimension to rise above
the scene to survey the status.

In some cases, a triangle is set up where you have a "customer" on
one corner, the InterNIC on the other and an ISP on the third. The
customer could be a small ISP and the ISP could be a major carrier
but the point is the same...triangles can be deadly, nothing gets done.

...a triangle, as opposed to a hierarchy, can cause some interesting
dead-locks where the buck is always on the other corner(s) of the three-way
arrangement...

...with a hierarchy, the buck passes up and down and it is easier to
see where it is at any point in time...

In order to break the dead-locks, someone has to try to take a leadership
role in these flat triangular relationship(s). This can be difficult because the other
two parties can always be resisting the change. There may be no cooperation.

Some parties in a two-dimensional flat triangular relationship may actually
discover that they are living in the one-dimensional world of lines. In that world,
they can only see two other parties (one at a time) and there is no concept that
the other parties see each other. In that world there is no chance for cooperation.

We can only judge our perception of the state of the system via our planar
relationships with other parties that think they have a global view. It will be
interesting to see if a three-dimensional world ever gets started in the Internet.
In order for that to happen, someone has to prove that they see more than
two other parties, cooperate with all of them, and all of them cooperate in
return. That is going to be tricky...:-)

--
Jim Fleming
UNETY Systems, Inc.
Naperville, IL 60563

e-mail: JimFleming at unety.net