It's not about the congestion, it's about the profit motive driving the industry

Fri Mar 20 22:12:51 UTC 2020

On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 10:52 AM Mike Bolitho <mikebolitho at gmail.com> wrote:

> >You're facing essentially the same issue as many in non-healthcare do ;
> how to best talk to applications in Magic Cloud Land. Reaching the major
> cloud providers does not require DIA ; they all have presences on the major
> IXes, and direct peering could be an option too depending on your needs and
> traffic.
>
> I totally agree and 99.999% of the time, congestion on the Internet is a
> nuisance, not a critical problem. I'm not sitting here complaining that my
> public internet circuits don't have SLAs or that we run into some packet
> loss and latency here and there under normal operations. That's obviously
> to be expected. But this whole topic is around what to do when a once in a
> lifetime pandemic hits and we're faced with unseen levels of congestion
> across the country's infrastructure. I mean the thread is titled COVID-19
> Vs Our Networks. That's why I brought up the possible application of TSP to
> tell some of the big CDNs that maybe they should limit 4K streaming or big
> DLCs during a pandemic. That's it. And yet I'm getting chastised (not
> necessarily by you) for suggesting that hospitals, governments, water
> treatment plants, power plants, first responders, etc are actually more
> important during times like this.
>
> - Mike Bolitho
>

I think it's time to re-stock on the "The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's
Computer In A Different Building" stickers...

While having streaming services voluntarily ratchet
their bitrates down during the crisis is a nice enough
response, I think the deeper underlying issue is that
any system that is CRITICAL for maintaining health and
safety during a pandemic or other crisis MUST be
capable of operating standalone in case the rest of
the infrastructure has melted down.

X-Ray systems at hospitals that refuse to work when
they can't talk to a license server in the cloud?

Nope.

If there's government intervention and regulation
that comes out of this, it should focus not on TSP
responses during a crisis, but on ensuring that
manufacturers of healthcare devices do not prioritize
making money over saving lives.

IF there is regulation to be made after this, THAT is what
it needs to focus on.

Internet congestion is a symptom, not the cause of this
thread.  Fix the real problem.
CRITICAL health care systems must be capable of operating
on their own during a state of emergency, not held captive to
the profit motives of rich executives.  :/

Matt
who finds it appalling that we consider it more important to make
money than to save lives.  :(

>
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 10:35 AM Tom Beecher <beecher at beecher.cc> wrote:
>
>> You're facing essentially the same issue as many in non-healthcare do ;
>> how to best talk to applications in Magic Cloud Land. Reaching the major
>> cloud providers does not require DIA ; they all have presences on the major
>> IXes, and direct peering could be an option too depending on your needs and
>> traffic.
>>
>> I don't mean to be dismissive of the issues you face, I apologize if
>> that's how it comes off. What you describe is certainly challenging, but I
>> think that you will have better success with some of the options that are
>> out there already than hoping for any resolution of intermittent congestion
>> issues in the wild west of the DFZ.
>>
>
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