North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Ungodly packet loss rates

  • From: Tony Li
  • Date: Tue Oct 22 04:05:43 1996

JBash,

In my experience, the primary technical factors that are hurting Internet
reliability at this time are roughly (in no particular order):

1) Poorly performing routers.  I would estimate that 50% of the packet loss
in the Internet today is wholly unnecessary and results soley from
defective gear.  The route cache paradigm (and subsequent cache thrashing)
in current cisco product, the lack of memd, missing high performance
interfaces, and the lack of backplane bandwidth are all grave problems.  I
will certainly accept some personal culpability here, but cisco has had far
too long to get its act together and has not responded.  I refer you to
Mr. Bilger for further progress.

2) Lack of bandwidth.  There are frequently cases where the bandwidth
simply does not exist.  This may be due to lack of planning, lack of will,
greed, or whatever.  Only economics will drive this forward.

3) Poor engineering.  The number of ISP's who have no idea what they're
doing is still quite high.  I refer you to Greg, Ravi, et. al. for war
stories on what really happens.

4) Lack of routing scalability.  You expressed amazement that the BGP mesh
still holds together.  My amazement exceeds yours.  A new generation of
protocol is needed which, if nothing else, is much easier to manage, and
can scale to larger domains.  You know some of the kludgery that was done
to aid this scaling.  It's time for a new generation which incorporates
this as the base.  Unfortunately, this isn't useful without #1.

Given this _technical_ environment where literally no one _CAN_ succeed in
delivering volume quality Internet connectivity, I'm not surprised that
you've gotten evasive, defensive, and non-sensical replies.

I wholeheartedly agree that the service level of the Internet as a whole is
pathetic, but given the above situation, your efforts are better spent
internally at cisco rather than trying to perform external social
engineering.  Once the technical situation improves, the market will
eliminate those who (for whatever reason) are unable to deliver.  If the
technical situation does not improve shortly, the market will simply
eliminate the Internet.  ;-(

Regards,
Tony
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