On Tue, 8 Oct 1996 19:23:47 -0400 (EDT) Dorian R. Kim wrote:
This sort of proposal, i.e. building a Higher Ed private network for research, is in and of itself not such a bad thing.
The grow of Internet since NSFNet shut down has put serious strains on the infrastructure that researchy folks used to use to do(and still do) their various work on.
How will throwing OC48 pipes at the university network solve the problem? Today a common university has about 10,000 PCs each with sound cards and the kids all do CuseeMe and Vocaltec. 3 years down the road they will all have VR gear attached to their PC in the dorm and will be doing netgaming in the evening. So the OC48 pipes gets stuffed and the researchers complain. Universities will use whatever bandwidth you throw at them. The reason for this is that within the university, access and use is unlimited and uncontrolled. The student and the professor have equal access from their workstation. That is why the Israeli university consortium has come up with a different solution. It is called chokepoint. A unix system that acts as a firewall/gateway. If the total access speed to the Internet is T1 then at the chokepoint one can define that port80 can use a maximum of 700kb. And one can define that telnet is guaranteed 30kb. And that 10.2.1.1 is guaranteed 128kb no matter what. This way, faculty server and faculty workstations can be given priority over student access. In addition, no one faculty member can "hog" the system. Faculty can even pay to the chokepoint to improve their service over others. An entire set of rules based on protocol and IP address can be set up and implemented. They have been running this way for the past 6 months. Perhaps rather than throwing $10M at the Internet II to buy more uncontrolled bandwidth, perhaps they would be interested in funding further research and development of this "chokepoint" to control better their taxpayer paid for resources? I am sure the Israeli university consortium would be willing to help their American counterparts. :-)
-dorian, speaking strictly for himself.
Hank Nussbacher Israel