At 04:23 PM 9/17/97 -0700, Pushpendra Mohta wrote:
Even in the scenario where physical proximity automatically implied network proximity, I think the assumption that local traffic will dominate communications needs to be revisited. It is true today, only because that is how people live lives and conduct business _today_. The concept of "community" today is geographical.. the communities of tommorrow may not be so restricted.
True, it's an assumption, but as I said in another message, the only other example we have of such a network is the telephone network. And, given the choice, why wouldn't most people join a local community rather than a far-away or abstract community? But there is not much point in arguing about this -- let's just keep our eyes on the traffic patterns and see what happens and adjust accordingly.
Another example is distributed web hosting. When distributed web hosting takes off, your backbone will be heavily discounted and your peripheral interconnect bandwidth will be woefully short. Web traffic will zoom as performance dramatically improves, but your backbone bandwidth will drop. That breaks your traffic model.
This is true of a business model based around content distrubution only. Most ISPs of size will have both publishers and consumers of information so the backbones utilization should be balanced.
I see a lot of asymmetries today. Some service providers have a lot of business access connections, some have mostly web hosting, and some have mostly retail eyeballs. Of course, CERFnet may be better able to balance than most, but I expect you'll support whatever sells, whether it balances or not. :-) Cheers. --Kent