MAE West

Mon Jul 14 18:48:31 UTC 1997

> > 2) assuming that costs favored having both aggregates in service, if
> > utilization on the two aggregates was 50% on (call it) A and 100% on B,
> > the 50% available on A would be wasted. Note that latency would go up,
> > because spanning tree would have pruned some intra-building link would
> > have been pruned in order to keep the inter-building link active. 
> 
> If this is true, then the Layer 2 bandwidth aggregation design is
> pretty weak, no?

You're mixing apples and oranges. 

> For example, (and yes, I know there's a world of difference) a MLPPP
> link is at (effectively) layer 2 (if not 1.5), and if one side of the
> link drops, the other side will carry what it can.

That is what happens within an aggregate. The multi-link PPP channel
corresponds to an "aggregate" in the terminology that I am using. 

The topic being discussed is not what happens within an aggregate, but
what happens when two aggregates are using. This would be akin to
having two multi-link PPP connections (each constructed out of some
number of physical links).

Stephen