Re: Info on MAE-EAST

["Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb () clark net>]

At 2:17 PM -0800 1/17/97, dave o'leary wrote:
> At 7:00 -0800 1/16/97, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
> > I can't claim to have recent numbers that suggest otherwise, but, some
> > historical information might at least be interesting.  In the early 80s, I
> > did a good deal of X.25 capacity planning.  At what was then GTE Telenet,
> > we found that up to 50% of our traffic stayed local in large cities.  The
> > larger the city, the more that seemed to stay local...this was especially
> > obvious in New York, where a great deal of financial data flowed.
>
> remember that in the early 80's you basically couldn't lease a T1
> from AT&T (I think it was 82 or so when they were first tariffed?)


Dave, reality was funnier than that.  It was 1980 or so when we actually
did get a T1 between Washington and New York, but eventually released it
because all of the DC-NY public network traffic wasn't enough to justify
that HUGE amount of bandwidth.

I did get the first nonmilitary T1 in the DC area in '77 or '78 at the
Library of Congress.  The then C&P Telephone couldn't really figure out how
to charge for it, so we got it dirt cheap -- and it worked very well.

> (watch out for that DC voltage...ouch! :-).

I have a very painful memory of running my finger over a punchdown with
some stranded wire that slightly got loose and broke the skin.  Knocked me
flat and sprained my shoulder.

> also DDS services were scarce, etc.  So (expensive) low speed analog
> was the option for leased lines - and private networks were rare.
> Since then of course the fallout from Judge Greene has changed some
> things, and it is cheap and easy to put up a DS0 across town - the
> cost justification vs. per packet charges is a lot different.
>
> > Now, these old statistics reflect mainframe-centric traffic, and more
> > private-to-private than arbitrary public access.  The latter is much more
> > characteristic of Internet traffic.
> >
> > SNA and X.25 tended to emphasize the ability to fine tune access to a
> > limited number of well-known resources, with relatively well-understood
> > traffic patterns.  The Internet, however, has emphasized arbitrary and
> > flexible connectivity, possibly to the detriment of performance tuning and
> > reliability.
>
> well the strategies for performance tuning are certainly different.
>
> [stuff cut]
> > Web cacheing would seem to encourage traffic to stay local.
>
> ahhh....yup.
>
>                                               dave



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