RINA - scott whaps at the nanog hornets nest :-)

Sat Nov 6 21:49:31 UTC 2010

> 
> While I think 9k for exchange points is an excellent target, I'll
> reiterate
> that there's a *lot* of SONET interfaces out there that won't be going
> away any time soon, so practically speaking, you won't really get more
> than 4400 end-to-end, even if you set your hosts to 9k as well.

Agreed.  But in the meantime, removing the 1500 bottlenecks at the
ethernet peering ports would at least provide the potential for the
connection to scale up to the 4400 available by the SONET links.  Right
now, nothing is possible above 1500 for most flows that traverse an
ethernet peering point.

My point is that 1500 is a relic.  Put another way, how come PoS at 4400
in the path doesn't break anything currently between endpoints while any
suggestion that ethernet be made larger than 1500 in the path causes all
this reaction?  We already HAVE MTUs larger than 1500 in the "middle"
part of the path.  This really doesn't change much of anything from that
perspective.

For example, simply taking Ethernet to 3000 would still be smaller than
SONET and even that would provide measurable benefit.

There is a certain "but that is the way it has always been done" inertia
that I believe needs to be overcome.  Increasing the path MTU has the
potential to greatly improve performance at practically no cost to
anyone involved.  We are throttling performance of the Internet for no
sound technical reason, in my opinion.

Now I could see where someone selling "jumbo" paths at a premium might
be reluctant to see the Internet generally go that path as it would
decrease their "value add", but that is a different story.