Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Mon Mar 2 17:20:53 UTC 2015

>Average != Peak.
>

What is peak?  There is a question for you. If we get all the way down to the fundamentals of any network, peak is always 100%.  There is either a bit on the wire or not.  Your network is either 100% busy or 100% idle at any instantaneous moment in time.  What matters is average transfer rate to the user experience and even that varies a lot depending on the app in question and how that app tolerates things like jitter, loss, and latency.  It is about whether data is being buffered waiting for a transmission window and is the buffer being cleared as fast as it is being filled.  A network is engineered to support some average levels because it would be very cost ineffective to engineer a wide area network to support peak transmission on all ports at all times.  All studies of network traffic show that it is not necessary to build a network that way.  Our networks are statistical multiplexers in their design and have been all the way back to the Bell System.  You do know that not everyone can make a phone call at once, right (but who would you call if everyone was already off hook, get it?)?  In fact, it is such a difficult problem that it is very hard to support inside a single data center class Ethernet switch.  In the wide area, it would be incredibly expensive to design an entirely non-blocking network at all traffic levels.  It could be built if you want to pay for it however.

>Why is this so hard to understand?
>
>Mike

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL