[70858] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: best effort has problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Iljitsch van Beijnum)
Fri May 28 19:34:52 2004
In-Reply-To: <p0610050ebcdd4a391bce@[10.0.1.3]>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 01:32:58 +0200
To: Gordon Cook <cook@cookreport.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On 28-mei-04, at 21:58, Gordon Cook wrote:
> I published a two month issue last weekend with the bottom line
> conclusion that there can be no telecom recovery as long as the
> industry relies solely on the best effort business model which I
> believe is not economically sustainable.
I fail to see how the facts support such a conclusion. What's happening
in the fiber business is free market economics 101. Sure, if people
would magically start paying much more money in order to be guaranteed
what they get anyway today, the people taking that money would be a lot
happier. What else is new.
Still, such a "better than best effort" service has interesting
technical consequences. A "better" service can't exist without a
"worse" service. You can delay and drop packets a little with a
lower-quality service, but not too much because TCP won't have it,
leading to congestion collapse with a network full of retransmissions
that never make it to the other end. So what we need is a new transport
protocol or modifications to TCP that make it possible to use the
available bandwidth even at high levels of congestion.
