On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Tersian wrote:
It's a way for Universities to talk to _each_other_ at higher speeds without having to pay for the *ahem* value "added" by the Internet. Higher-Ed
Would this be such a Bad Thing(tm)? Many times I have seen research professors and students in the research field getting extremely upset because data that they used to exchange with other schools and countries is now taking 20 times longer because Joe Blow from L.A. is checking out all his favorite sports stories 300 times a day and John Dough is downloading all the porn he can fit on his 5 gig drive from across the country.
You neglected to point out that Joe Blow and John Dough are both undergraduate students at the two universities in question and are using up the university's T1 that was virtually empty two years ago.
I wouldn't really see this move as a "Internet Separatist" movement, more as a "return to normalcy" in the true spirit of the Internet. Consider if you were a biochemical research student at biochem.edu and you wanted to transfer a 30Meg molecular model back and forth between biochem.edu and chem.edu but in between both of you were hundreds and thousands of hosts,
This *IS* the NANOG list, my friend. We now know you are a fool or a liar because we all know that TCP/IP is rarely configured to use more than 30 hops between two connections and most .edu sites in North America would have 15 or less hops. Several orders of magnitude less that the hundreds that you claim.
entertainment purposes. Wouldn't you be a little upset when your ftp was finished at .098K/s over a multi-homed DS3?
Sure, if I were a clueless biochem researcher I would be peeved. But if I were a clueful biochem researcher then I would realize that networking is not my specialty and I would be overstepping myself to make claims in the field. Thus I would seek out the networking specialists and ask them to examine the problem and determine why this is so slow. No doubt the problem would be traced to either local Ethernet congestion at the university due to poor network topology or an overloaded T1 line due to administrators who thought that WAN costs would be fixed for the next twenty years. If there are problems, we have the diagnostic tools to trace them down and find the true cause and then fix the true problem. There is no point in guessing because anybody who does this stuff for a living knows that if you have ten problems with virtually identical symptoms you will track them down to ten different root causes. It could be as simple as a faulty Ethernet card on the machine in the office down the hall causing spurious collisions, a broken router in a grossly overheated wiring closet, or water in an sloppily spliced copper cable. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com