Ungodly packet loss rates

Wed Oct 23 11:07:09 UTC 1996

Gord',

You said:

>"... But what if the big four no longer see the need to
>upgrade their bandwidth INTO and OUT OF exchange points?  what happens to
>the "secondary ten" when they get some large customers who see their
>packects die between Sprints mae east router and the nearest sprint
>backbone POP if that pipe is over crowded. "

The argument can be made, and there might be empirical data to back it up,
that the private interconnects actually offload *at least in the short
term* the participants' pipes into the public exchange points.  For
example, if a significant fraction (1/4th to 1/3rd) of the S and M  and ...
traffic into a public exchange is S and M and ... talking among each other,
then offloading much of it at some other place might reduce the fractions
(maybe to 1/10th to 1/5th).   Of course, if their business models do not
include eventual upgrading of their pipes into public exchanges, they will
have to balance the reduced <performance|reachability> to the Internet at
large as seen by their customers against any savings from not upgrading.

(Disclaimer:  I pulled the numbers out of thin air, so anybody who quotes
them is as foolish as I  for having put numbers in writing in the first
place.)

--Steve