Personally, flaws or not, I welcome Boardwatch's attempts to come up with a widely-published metric for the Internet. This likely will lead other publications into similar investigations, some of which may well bring the writers and editors of various periodicals into contact with the folks at CAIDA.

I agree that it is important that good, scientifically-sound metrics be widely-published. I hope that all such publicity in the future will make reference to the work of CAIDA. From the information available thus far (to me at least), this metric does not appear to be scientifically-sound and the publicity does not reference the work of CAIDA.

Also, flaws or not, Boardwatch did do something fantastically clever, and that's examining things on an end-to-end basis, rather than obsessing about details of what's going on between the endpoints. People concerned about the abysmal end-to-end throughput of even modern TCP across much of the present Internet should be rejoicing and helping other journalists develop better and more scientific approaches to categorizing expected versus observed end-to-end performance.

I agree that end-to-end measurement is important. As I am certain you are aware, there is work being done to build useful, scientifically-sound ways of measuring end-to-end performance in which the various factors affecting such performance can be described. This will help everyone involved (consumers, engineers and marketers) more effectively understand performance. The Keynote technique does little to break-down these factors. As others have pointed out, this is one of its key flaws. -- Stan | Academ Consulting Services |internet: sob@academ.com Olan | For more info on academ, see this |uucp: {mcsun|amdahl}!academ!sob Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only mine.