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: michael@memra.com