On Fri, Jan 23, 1998 at 10:55:17AM -0800, Paul A Vixie wrote:
Now, if you want to *CLAIM* DS1 speeds but actually deliver something that looks more like an ISDN connection, then its possible.
T1 into a local provider is still T1, though. The main bandwidth consumers hereabouts are HTTP, NNTP, and DNS. All of these are "cacheable" at the local provider, and having T1 access to those data repositories is still quite useful. Not all traffic has to go to the other side of the planet.
Well, yes and no. NNTP absolutely is. DNS is low-volume enough that its irrelavent. HTTP is not nearly as cacheable as you would think, and caching it has some bad side effects in many cases - which your customers will likely bitch about.
But where I come from advertising something you can't deliver is commonly known as fraud.
We just call that "marketing" around here. But your point is valid: this low-cost last-mile service should be described in terms of access to the ISP's local resources (which will therefore have to grow a lot from now). Hell, maybe there's something in this transparent caching idea after all?
Let's say that you can cache 50% of the HTTP traffic, which frankly, from what I've seen is HIGHLY aggressive, but I'll be nice and give you that for the sake of argument.
Nobody in their right mind would sell T1 to every customer and do 1000:1 overcommit of their transit links without some kind of bandwidth shaping. Since that shaping is part of the engineering plan, the marketroids will have to find some way to come clean about it in the advertising glossies.
Ok, so its only 500:1 assuming 50% effectiveness on the HTTP side. It still won't work. Now, if you intend to rate-shape (as opposed to tossing packets on the floor when you get overcommitted) then you ARE committing fraud if you don't tell the truth about it. And, frankly, the customer really gets hosed with this kind of model - because you have to be pretty predictive for this to give you any kind of net gain in effective utilization, which means you apply the chokes BEFORE the peak levels get hit. The business models on which this stuff is based are full of assumptions that anyone who has been in this business for more than a week knows won't work in the real world. At least, not in the world that we call the "Internet". Now if you want to set up a private network which is called and is in fact something less than that (ie: "Citynet"), you might be able to make it work. Maybe. The people running around shouting that "bandwidth will be too cheap to meter" sound a LOT like the crowd that was doing this in relationship to Nuclear Power and electricity 20 years ago. Today, the TRUTH is that Nuclear energy is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, and in fact its SO expensive that places like Illinois, where ComEd generates a lot of it from that form, don't have enough on peak demand days and have to pipe it in and/or start turning people off! -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin http://www.mcs.net/ | T1's from $600 monthly to FULL DS-3 Service | NEW! K56Flex support on ALL modems Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| EXCLUSIVE NEW FEATURE ON ALL PERSONAL ACCOUNTS Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | *SPAMBLOCK* Technology now included at no cost