Lessons from the AU model

Paul Vixie vixie at isc.org
Tue Jan 22 18:51:08 UTC 2008


gih at apnic.net (Geoff Huston) writes:

> Which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm very sceptical of Tom's
> exponential optimism in this particular area of infrastructure investment
> :-)

the internet often hasn't made good economic sense.  consider the chewage
and swallowage of resources by modems, which eventually reached the limit
where every iota of voicegrade on a circuit was in use, causing telco's to
lose profit because they had an overcommit model and whereas they could
compress 98% of a voice call they could not compress any of a modem call.

flat rate connectivity (insensitive to distance or kilosegments or etc) is
only practical under massive overprovisioning.  we need moore's law to keep
on going forever, and we need similar speeds of advance in optics and in
power utilization.  companies who can't massively overprovision will just
continue to be shouldered aside by companies who can.  new capital will keep
on entering the market, and win or lose based on some disruptive approach,
and then the winners will get shouldered aside a generation or two later.

it's 2008, and no part of this should sound like news or insight to anybody.

what i like about non-flat models like the one described as working for NZ
and AU is that it will keep truly worthless flows off the network.  finally
there's a reason not to mindlessly share everything with everybody everywhere.
(which is the only part of the equation that free market capitalism can't
otherwise solve.)
-- 
Paul Vixie



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