On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:35:21 EDT, Sean Donelan said:
This doesn't explain why many universities, most with active, symmetric ethernet switches in residential dorms, have been deploying packet shaping technology for even longer than the cable companies. If the answer was as simple as upgrading everyone to 100Mbps symmetric ethernet, or even 1Gbps symmetric ethernet, then the university resnet's would be in great shape.
If I didn't know better, I'd say Sean was trolling me, but I'll bite anyhow. ;) Actually, upgrading everybody to 100BaseT makes the problem worse, because then if everybody cranks it up at once, the problem moves from "need upstream links that are $PRICY" into the "need upstream links that are $NOEXIST". We have some 9,000+ students resident on campus. Essentially every single one has a 100BaseT jack, and we're working on getting to Gig-E across the board over the next few years. That leaves us two choices on the upstream side - statistical mux effects (and emulating said effects via traffic shaping), or find a way to trunk 225 40GigE links together. And that's just 9,000 customers - if we were a provider the size of most cable companies, we'd *really* be in trouble. Fortunately, statistical mux effects and a little bit of port-agnostic traffic shaping (you go over a well-publicized upload byte limit for a 24 hour span, you get magically turned into a 56k dialup), we fit quite nicely into a single gig-E link and a 622mbit link. Now if any of you guys have a lead on an affordable way to get 225 40GigE's from here to someplace that can *take* 225 40Gig-E's... ;)