At 09:01 AM 15-10-96 -0700, Milo Medin wrote:
Really Ken, just because you consult to PacBell, you shouldn't be so obvious in your posturing. :-)
Well, Milow, it's hardly posturing. More a gesture. :-) Everyone who's been to NANOG knows that I work for PacBell on the NAP. I believe that you yourself were once a consultant for a long stint at Ames, working for Sterling Software before you stepped over and became a government employee? I don't think you can so easily discredit me for being a low-life self-prostituting money-grubbing consultant. But nice try. I'm sure you've read the Upside article and the issue it raises regarding TCI's investment in the necessary cable plant upgrades to support @Home?
Cable modems by themselves don't don't the performance problem, in fact, that's what @Home has been talking about for sometime now, and why we believe you have to build an intelligent network architecture, not just dumb pipes.
That is certainly true and no one better to architect a data network that works for the web than you. An xDSL network needs the same kind of caching and replication as you are designing into the @Home network for the same reasons. Fortunately, it isn't rocket science (to take your old NASA phrase) and doesn't require proprietary extensions, although some might like to lock in a subscriber to proprietary features of an intelligent web architecture.
Some folks do believe that just fixing the loop will fix system performance, and they are clearly in the wrong. However, I will venture to say that unless you do something like what we're doing, it doesn't matter if the loop is ADSL or Cable or laser, it's not going to end up running very fast. This is not just a loop problem.
Right again, just fixing the loop problem isn't enough, but since we are tangentially back on that topic, what exactly has TCI and the other cable partners committed to regarding the investment in cable plants outside the Bay Area? For while you absolutely must have an intelligent data architecture, you also absolutely must have a solution to the local loop problem. You go fix the local loops at TCI and I'll get PacBell to roll out an intelligent data architecture along with the xDSL service. --Kent