FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Mike O'Dell [mo () ccr org]
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 6:46 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"

it's interesting that the Commissioner's op-ed piece proceeds from
apocrypha exhibiting a fundamental factual error:

Jacobson's Congestion Avoidance Algorithm does *not* "prioritize
applications and content needing 'real time' delivery over those
that would not suffer from delay."

that would have been "IntServe" - the failed Integrated Services model
promulgated in the IETF half a decade later which was never viable
at the scale of the Global "Big-I" Internet.

No, Jacobson's algorithm made all TCP streams on the same path tend to
share more or less equitably when viewed over a relatively long
interval.

as has been reported before ad nauseum, the behavior being complained
about these days is an application simply using multiple TCP streams,
each one of which gets treated independently.

as is often the case, the network behavior which some claim to desire,
treating all streams from a "single application instance" as an
aggregate managed in toto, requires the real-time imputation of intent
which is generally only available in retrospect.

if one possessed an algorithm which could read minds and tell the future
to the degree required by that, one could find better uses for it
than simply managing TCP flows. (grin)

     -mo



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