critique of NANOG meeting

Michael Dillon michael at memra.com
Wed Jun 19 04:46:12 UTC 1996


On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Jeff Young wrote:

> metcalfe understands the issues only too well.  only the truly
> blessed can blindly exploit half-truths.  he is not blessed and
> he is not blind. 
> 
> unfortunately, mr. metcalfe is living in the world of suits.
> very expensive suits. 

He is also living in the world of the user. One who perhaps made the wrong
choice in choosing an ISP. One who perhaps doesn't know how to tell the
difference between local congestion at the ISP, congestion in core routers
and congestion at an overloaded WWW server.

So, IMHO, he has a point. Service is often quite poor. But he's pointing
the finger in the wrong direction. The problem is with incompetent or
greedy ISP's who grossly oversell their lines or build broken networks or
sell too many virtual WWW servers on one poor 486 server. 

This is one of the reasons why the Internet now needs some sort of
centralised performance monitoring and trouble ticketing system. If you
can point the blame at an ISP's congested T1 or a company's overloaded WWW
server, and make this info public, then people will soon learn that there
is many, many more than just one reason for congestions and therefore we
also need many, many solutions. 

But one thing is sure. The folks on NANOG are not good at telling their
story, at marketing their successes and trumpetting their greatness to the
world. If people would start doing this, then you would see more press
coverage of Internet operations realities and more people, even
journalists, would get an inkling of how things really are going.

Michael Dillon                                   ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com






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