New MAE-EAST

Tue Nov 11 13:24:45 UTC 1997

"Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us> writes:

> At the risk of litigation, Kent makes a good point here: how much of
> the problems we see are engineering based, and how much are (let's say
> it softly: political?

A great deal of the Internet's evolution has been affected
in the past by a number of strong personalities, each of
whom had her or his own set of political beliefs.  There
is probably no aspect of the Internet which is untouched
by this observation.

To some extent ALL of the problems at MAE-EAST and
MAE-WEST are political, which is unsurprising, as they
were both born out of politics.  The first was created as
a somewhat practical, somewhat political action against
unfair ENSS access terms, the second was created as a
political action against bad NAP design, PAC*Bell, the ATM
heads at Bellcore, and probably the NSF as an agency.

The names themselves come from Andrew Partan, one of those
people with strong personalities and technical acumen.

MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST are exploding because they are
victims of success.  They completely blew the official
alternatives out of the water, to the extent that ANS and
the ATM NAP operators are generally seen these days as
Also-Rans.  Unfortunately, they are in danger of blowing
themselves out of the water too, thanks to the
difficulties of scaling to meet demand.

The history of MAE-EAST's technical evolution is amusing.
There have been enormous problems in the past which have
lead to threats of complete withdrawal by the initial
parties, and occasional partial withdrawals.  The current
trend towards using private point-to-point links is really
not much more different than, for example, the SWAB (in
reaction to the MAE distributed ethernet not working under
load, and MFS taking a long time to figure out how to
address the problem properly), except that it was better
thought-out than that was, and considerably more popular.

To be brutal (who, me?), I think that the people who
scream "this is purely (or even primarily) political not
technical!" about decisions which clearly favour an NSP's
stability and technical survivability are those people who
also have very strong personalities but lack the technical
acumen to affect the evolution of the Internet in general.

On the other hand, those people who assert that the
decisions are purely technical are probably being disingenuous.
You may now feel free to quote some of my messages from
previous lives if you like.  It would serve me right.  --:)

	Sean.