At 10:31 AM 9/20/2002 -0400, David Diaz wrote:
The only negative routing comments Ive heard are complaints about extra hop counts.
Dave - I know you know this and you are referring to an issue that both of us have heard.... The hidden assumption here is that the extra hops implies worse performance. This is perception rather than real. One could quite easily put in place a VPN or MPLS substrate and make all destinations appear "one hop away" without changing the underlying technology or performance of the network. A network application with clear latency/jitter/packet loss characteristics would be a more effective way to evaluate network fitness. I suspect what really happens is a) the is a performance problem somewhere in the path b) a traceroute is done c) the traceroute is misinterpreted - "the problem is packets go all over the place!" d) the misinterpretation is generalized to "more hops is bad" from what I've seen anyway. Bill