923Mbits/s across the ocean

Sat Mar 8 21:24:21 UTC 2003

> With the glossing over of details that goes with press releases there
> appears to be a misunderstanding here.  I never said we paid list prices.
> I am well aware that one can get large discounts from vendors. However, I
> think it is important to quote a well known price (in this case list),
> which people can relate to how well they think they can negotiate
> (otherwise it just becomes a bragging point of who can get the largest
> discount), and gets away from the point of giving people an idea of what
> it might cost.  In our case we got 100% (free) discounts from Level(3) and
> Cisco for the Sunnyvale to Chicago link and the GSR.

Ok, after such explanation, I am more than willing to accept that it could
be a good use of the money, including the money that was paid to people to
sit and tweak parameters of gear, kernels, NIC cards to achieve
imporovements in speed (since no one in production world can justify having
people on the clock doing just that to document the smallest possible
improvements).

> High speed at reasonable costs are the end-goal. However, it is important
> to be able to plan for when one will need such links, to know what one
> will be able to achieve, and for regular users to be ready to use them
> when the commonly available. This takes some effort up front to achieve
> and demonstrate.

True, however as it was mentioned before, why not do the same type of
testing in a lab environment between a couple of boxes having the TCP stack
insert appropriate delays? When in 1995 we were getting simplex IP links
over satellites up that is how we did the testing before bringing them up
on the birds.

Alex