North American Network Operators Group

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Re: links on the blink (fwd)

  • From: Michael Dillon
  • Date: Wed Nov 08 16:14:03 1995

On Wed, 8 Nov 1995, Dave Mills wrote:

> Devious would it be for me to monkey in this debate; however, I'm sure
> HWB will pick up on these points. Ten percent loss is most definitely
> not within the envelope of acceptable service. The protocol models I
> have participated in developing and evaluating perform best at loss rates
> not exceeding one percent on average. My access is now from London,
> where the transatlantic loss rates are more like 30 percent. I would
> recommend a sentence to any advocate/employee/consultant making a claim
> such as yours to live with these rates for any length of time.

You'll be pleased to know that I, living in Canada, did have a consulting 
engagement in London for a couple of weeks via telnet and know just what 
that kind of loss rate is like.

> Second, you suggest patience and that the problems should go away in
> ten years. Excuse me, I heard (and even said myself as NSF advisor and
> researcher) the identical words ten years ago. 

Sooner or later, someone who says "wait ten years" will be right. I base 
my statement on the knowledge that cable ships are furiously plowing the 
oceans and girdling the planet with large bundles of fibre. There was 
also the Sprint announcement at Telecom 95 that they will be operating a 
globe girdling fully meshed backbone. No doubt several other companies 
will do the same. 

I believe that the only real lasting solution to packet loss problems is a 
combination of bandwidth and topology. When each backbone company uses 
high bandwidth fibre throughout and operates their own fully meshed 
topology that is interconnected not only at NAPS but at numerous two-way 
interchange points with other backbone providers, then we have a chance 
at getting lower packet loss rates.

If nasty video protocols get deployed on the Internet then I could be 
wrong about the ten years. But if video migrates to a parallel 
globe-girdling ATM network then the Internet could be much better in ten 
years.

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: [email protected]