Internet Architecture Diagram - Comments Please

Dean Anderson dean at av8.com
Thu Mar 19 01:49:58 UTC 1998


At 9:34 AM -0500 3/18/98, Randy Bush wrote:
>>( http://navigators.com/internet_architecture.html )
>>
>>My Intention with this page is to answer the Question:
>> "What are the major pieces of the Internet,
>>and who are the major players in each segment?"
>>
>>I have created a "very tall diagram" with 8 sections, covering the
>>connection from a Users's PC -> local Loop -> ISP POP - > Backbones ->
>>online content -> etc.
>
>And it has no routers in the network diagrams.  What a tremendous savings!

There pretty clearly *are* routers in the diagram. Those would be those
little blue and green interconnected dots.  You can tell by the "Large
Capacity Routers and Switches" label.   Perhaps you didn't see the same
diagram I saw.

I might suggest that more detail on the variation of the corporate network
could be helpful. Internal networks of large corporations like Hitachi (7th
largest corporation in the world) are many times more complicated than even
large ISP interconnects.   I find this is the biggest problem that most
people I talk to have. They understand a dialup connection.  They
understand an ethernet. They don't understand that the technology to scale
their company from 5 to 50 to 300 to 10,000 is much different from one
scale to another.  They mainly don't understand the scaling issues.

>Welcome to the new internet.  No wonder users are confused.

People are confused when they look quickly, don't grasp all the details,
and then flame.  Ready, fire, aim.   Doesn't matter how good the diagram
is, you apparently can't avoid the fact that people will not look at it
before offering their opinion to others.  Anyway, I think it looks like a
pretty reasonable diagram.  If all end users (and some network engineers)
understood that much, I think we would have made great progress.

		--Dean


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           Plain Aviation, Inc                  dean at av8.com
           LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
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