923Mbits/s across the ocean

Sat Mar 8 20:58:45 UTC 2003

> To paraphrase many a california sufer, "dude, chill out."

When the none of my taxes goes to the silly projects, I will chill out.

It had been stated by the people that participated in this research that

(a) they bought hardware at the prices to help Cisco to make its quarters
(b) they have spent millions of dollars for OC-192 links when they did not
need them.
(c) they did not come up with anything new apart from a "proof" that they
achieved that speed.

> The bleeding edge of performance in computers and networks is always
> stupidly expensive.  But once you've achieved it, the things you
> did to get there start to percolate back into the consumer stream,
> and within a few years, the previous bleeding edge is available
> in the current O(cheap) hardware.

That is all great if they *actually* *developed* something. However, they
did not. They bought off the shelf products for list prices plugged them in,
ran slightly tweaked kernels, helped Qwest/Globalcrossing etc prop its
quarters and announced "we did it".

> A cisco 7000 used to provide the latest and greatest performance
> in its day, for a rather considerable cost.  Today, you can get a
> box from Juniper for the same price you paid for your 7000 that
> provides a few orders of magnitude more performance.
> 
> But to get there, you have to be willing to see what happens when
> you push the envelope.  That's the point of the LSR, and a lot of
> other research efforts.

That's the argument that pentagon used to justify buying $40 lightbulbs. 
Does not work, sorry.

Alex