Steve,
There are a few things that I see make the Bell Labs study dissimilar from the
backbone core. The Bell Labs study looked at LANs and systems with modest
levels of aggregation compared to an OC12+ backbone link. The traffic mix for
the Bell Labs study included a large amount of NFS traffic, which is high data
volume UDP traffic with little flow control. I don't think you'll find much of
that on the intercity links, relatively. I also expect the RTT times involved
with the TCP traffic on the Bell Labs LAN were much smaller than the norm for
intercity links, causing the slow start ramps to be much longer in the later.
These things make it reasonable that they would see different results than
seen on an OCn link.
jerry