randy@psg.com (Randy Bush) writes:
Just out of curiosity, why do many (not all) of the large backbone providers establish their face to the web (their corporate webserver) on slow, badly positioned machines?
Because it is done by marketing, not engineering?
In my opinion, this alone should reduce the Value Number of any given provider. Personally, flaws or not, I welcome Boardwatch's attempts to come up with a widely-published metric for the Internet. This likely will lead other publications into similar investigations, some of which may well bring the writers and editors of various periodicals into contact with the folks at CAIDA. Also, flaws or not, Boardwatch did do something fantastically clever, and that's examining things on an end-to-end basis, rather than obsessing about details of what's going on between the endpoints. People concerned about the abysmal end-to-end throughput of even modern TCP across much of the present Internet should be rejoicing and helping other journalists develop better and more scientific approaches to categorizing expected versus observed end-to-end performance. The combination of work aimed at measuring the internals of one's network and work that measures the "(un)happiness" of certain classes of applications should be of enormous value to engineers willing to admit that they don't know all the things that affect network performance observed by end-users. The reality, however, is that most American ISPs seem to engage in knee-jerk denial or aggressive posturing whenever there is a suggestion that their network is anything but perfect. I certainly have been in the middle of that kind of thing, so I can hardly claim innocence. Such reactions are pure marketing: we can't admit that maybe there is some way we could improve things or some set of things our network doesn't do well because that would hurt our product image. People who react with marketing-think and who build with marketing-think in the first place deserve to be torn apart by analyses based in marketing-think. While the article in question isn't in my hands yet, based on Mr Rickard's and others' comments on the NANOG list, I think it's safe to guess that this is precisely what the Boardwatch study does. Sean.