Internet Backbone Index

Fri Jun 27 18:45:22 UTC 1997

They could be.  The attempt is to factor that out.  ALL measuring agents
applied to ALL the backbones.  And all contributed more or less equally to
the end numbers.  If a particular agent ran on a Commodore 64 with a kluged
copy of KA9Q, and another agent ran on an Sun Solaris, both results would
go into the result pile for all 29 measured networks.   The net effect
would be that the flaw would be in our "footprint" from which the
measurements were taken.  This footprint can only be a rough approximation
of end user distribution anyway. It would affect absolute values relative
to zero, but the relative indexes between networks should not be affected. 
Since we're looking at the relative relationship primarily, it wouldn't
appear important.

Jack Rickard
----------
> From: Stan Barber <sob at academ.com>
> To: Justin W. Newton <justin at priori.net>; Larry Vaden <vaden at texoma.net>;
Sean Donelan <SEAN at SDG.DRA.COM>; nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Re: Internet Backbone Index
> Date: Friday, June 27, 1997 1:54 PM
> 
> Justin writes:
> > ObAboutTopic:  This is possibly the most flawed study on the planet.
> > Remind me to get a fast web server.  (And to think, we were going to
put
> > our web server in our office, behind a T-1, instead of in real estate
near
> > where the real bandwidth is that could be used for customers.).  
> 
> There are many studies more flawed. Consider some of the studies that
> the Tobacco Institute has released over the years about the affects of
> smoking.
> 
> Concerning Internet performance, there have always been a variety of ways
> of measuring it. It all depends on what you are really trying to measure.
> The Keynote study is attempting to measure something to which the average

> Internet user (not engineers) can relate.  However, There are also
clearly 
> the possibility of artifacts in the data because of the testing machine's

> TCP stack or other issues (Vern Paxson has covered these issues at NANOG 
> and IETF meetings over the last few years). Checking their web site,
their 
> software appears to run on top of the TCP stacks of many systems, so the 
> known artifacts of some of these platforms could be an issue.
> 
> -- 
> Stan   | Academ Consulting Services        |internet: sob at academ.com
> Olan   | For more info on academ, see this |uucp:
{mcsun|amdahl}!academ!sob
> Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only
mine.