On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Jeff Young wrote:
metcalfe understands the issues only too well. only the truly blessed can blindly exploit half-truths. he is not blessed and he is not blind.
unfortunately, mr. metcalfe is living in the world of suits. very expensive suits.
He is also living in the world of the user. One who perhaps made the wrong choice in choosing an ISP. One who perhaps doesn't know how to tell the difference between local congestion at the ISP, congestion in core routers and congestion at an overloaded WWW server. So, IMHO, he has a point. Service is often quite poor. But he's pointing the finger in the wrong direction. The problem is with incompetent or greedy ISP's who grossly oversell their lines or build broken networks or sell too many virtual WWW servers on one poor 486 server. This is one of the reasons why the Internet now needs some sort of centralised performance monitoring and trouble ticketing system. If you can point the blame at an ISP's congested T1 or a company's overloaded WWW server, and make this info public, then people will soon learn that there is many, many more than just one reason for congestions and therefore we also need many, many solutions. But one thing is sure. The folks on NANOG are not good at telling their story, at marketing their successes and trumpetting their greatness to the world. If people would start doing this, then you would see more press coverage of Internet operations realities and more people, even journalists, would get an inkling of how things really are going. Michael Dillon ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com