On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Sean Doran wrote:
Come on, Vadim, this is a great idea. They should build this cheaper faster better network to be used exclusively for meritorious traffic because it's in the national interests of the USA.
Moreover, the the members of the Internet II consortium (hi University MIS types and management!) and any governmental funding body involved should mandate that any meritorious traffic use IPv6 *only* and set an end-to-end IPv6 option to indicate which traffic should go across Internet II and which should go across whatever IPv6 Internet exists as provided by Evil Commercial Interests at the ridiculously high prices which are being charged universities and research labs.
Moreover, they should also mandate that Internet II be built on ATM, use ABR, and also use RSVP to guarantee the kinds of qualities of service that the R&E community requires.
Sean, isn't this excessive cruelty to those that have to deal with this in the end? 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. Given that the exponential growth of the net is projected to continue, it's not completely baseless to think that the problems we've seen over the last 12 months or so will continue. So if you follow that train of thought, building a private net for "important/meritorious" traffic makes some amount of sense. Now, it must be pointed out that a large part of the problem is in the way overloaded access pipe many of these universities have to various ISPs, placing a fair amount of culpability to the universities themselves. It should also be pointed out that while the basic idea might have some merit, it's highly debatable whether this private network will be worth the investment once this idea goes through the normal academic politics (way too many cooks), ATM-mania, bureaucracy, delays, normal academic shoe-string budget, etc. Hey, at the very least, shoe-string budget network strung together with bubblegums and built-in cumbersome bureaucratic rules and progress decelerator should make it a very interesting thing in a researchy academic sort of a way. -dorian, speaking strictly for himself.