Traffic Engineering

Thu Sep 18 11:59:59 UTC 1997

On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> C'mon, Vadim.  As the Net, and the Web in particular, grow more
> geographically dense -- IE: as there _is_ more local stuff for users to
> look at -- they _will_; people are natively more interested in that
> which is near to them geographically.
> 
> And unless we unload that traffic from the backbones and the NAP's,
> _it_ will be what melts down the net.

Perhaps, but I don't believe it.

See, the really neat thing about the 'net is it *removes* the geographical
locality as a barrier.

People have interests, very specific interests.  The number of people
interested in following alt.barney.die.die.die are geographically
dispersed, but the Internet brings them together in a virtual community.

Search engines, as primitive as they are now, make it much easier to find
whatever specific item you're looking for, and odds are overwhelming that
it's not on your neighbors server.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is much more interested in the national
news and politics than local.

And we've not really begun to explore the "virtual corporation" to see how
spread out pieces of a logical entity are when geography is removed as a
barrier.

--- David Miller

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