Re: Traffic Engineering

["Kent W. England" <kwe () geo net>]

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