Internet Backbone Index

Thu Jul 10 18:55:15 UTC 1997

>Where does most of the latency come from? Routers.

Uhh...  what about longlines??

>MAEs and NAPs are
>yesterdays ideas that everyone who has bought into the concept now has to
>live with it, they did not build the business around the fact they had to
>pay and manage to provide good service.

Hey, if that's your opinion then that's fine. Most of us aren't so ready to
throw out *ANY* of the tools available to us to build networks. Routers
have a place, IXPs have a place and switching has a place. You do things
your way and we'll do it our own ways and next year we will see who had the
best ideas.

>The time is almost upon us that you pay for what you get on the internet
>and you must pay for the bandwidth that you use, not what you can over
>subscribe until your customer begin to leave.  This is a tough model, few
>will make it.

What makes it tough is that there is very low customer demand for this sort
of network. Every experiment with pay-per-use communications services over
the past twenty years has shown that customers don't like it. The Internet
boom of 1995 demonstrated quite graphically that flat rate telecom has an
outrageously strong customer demand. Our job is to figure out how to
continue to scale a network that can profitably provide flatrate services.
That's the bread and butter of this industry.

>Some day the internet will use measurements, such as QOS and customer will
>be willing to pay for those who have engineered their networks to provide
>QOS.

Yes, definitely. But that's still an extra cost luxury over and above the
flatrate bread and butter services. ANd there is no certainty that ATM will
be needed to provide QOS. There are some interesting options in certain
routers as well.

>I only have one more question for you; how many router hops, on your
>network, from New York to Los Angeles?  If it is more than 1, then tell me
>what your latency is from end to end.  Let's compare, shall we.

You aren't going to make latency disappear by replacing router hops with
ATM switch hops. Those electrons still have to cross the continent.

********************************************************
Michael Dillon                    voice: +1-415-482-2840
Senior Systems Architect            fax: +1-415-482-2844
PRIORI NETWORKS, INC.              http://www.priori.net

"The People You Know.  The People You Trust."
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