On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Kavi, Prabhu wrote:
I don't think UUNET considered it a waste. UUNET could not have grown as quickly as it did during the mid to late 90s without L2 (Frame and ATM) technologies. Fortunately for them, they did not have any pure IP only zealots that prevented the pragmatic use of other technologies in their networks. Otherwise they probably would not have been able to outrun the other ISPs. UUNET received two benefits from it: 1. Speed, since at the time L2 switches were faster than routers, and 2. Traffic engineering, which saved them money in transport costs. Point 1 is no longer valid. Point 2 is still valid. UUNET built bigger and better networks at the time because of this. The market decided that UUNET was right. UUNET's shareholders were well rewarded because of what you called this "waste".
I don't think you can make a strong argument on TE being that big of a factor. It's more likely that the provider market's winner-take-all nature combined with acquisitions and attrition contributed much more to their growth then and benefits derived from traffic engineering. Furthermore, it may be possible that complex traffic engineering is becoming less of a factor as backbone networks become increasingly based on physical transports that are less heterogenous (in terms of log(backbone_speed/client access speed)). -- The comments and opinions expressed herein are those of the author of this message and may not reflect the policies of the Martin County Board of County Commissioners.