[11177] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: What is an "Internet reseller"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Nordlund)
Thu Mar 24 04:18:10 1994
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 10:50:00 CST-600
From: Dave Nordlund <NORDLUND@ccstaff.cc.ukans.edu>
To: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger), com-priv@psi.com
> From: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
> Subject: Re: What is an "Internet reseller"?
> To: fidelman@civicnet.org (Miles R Fidelman)
> Date sent: Tue, 22 Mar 1994 00:58:42 -0600 (CST)
> Copies to: com-priv@psi.com
>
> A SLIP customer loads the network infrastructure MUCH more heavily than
> the host user.
>
> Here's the reasons:
>
> 1) The SLIP customer reads news over NNTP. NNTP is effectively telnet
> in a package. This means lots of small packets, which are horribly
> inefficient and harder to route than big packets.
>
> The host user reads news over either local spool (no net load) or
> over NFS (big packets, and lower overall load). Anyone doing NNTP
> in this situation should look at the issues here and consider
> switching. In many cases it can be a huge win.
>
> 2) SLIP customers run Mosaic a lot. Mosaic is a line burner. Host users
> can't run it at all.
>
> 3) SLIP customers tend to "ping" on things (like mail servers) to check
> for new traffic. Host customers generally don't do that, although
> they may load a machine heavier.
>
> 4) On average, a SLIP session lasts significantly longer than a host
> session. This does ugly things to your line usage models; we had
> to adjust ours when we brought SLIP and PPP accounts online here
> to account for the different loading pattern. Note that despite
> our flat-rate shell accounts, our loading pattern there has been
> stable on averages for over a year!
>
> My observations are that SLIP customers load the network infrastructure
> heavily, while host customers load the hosts heavily. Network
> infrastructure tends to cost more money than host machine power and disk
> space. On the converse, a SLIP customer, once set up, generally doesn't
> cause trouble tickets to be generated (but the curve on initial install is
> nasty). Host customers are easier to set up, but tend to be a support
> load all the time.
>
> Its a trade-off. Much depends on what you have more of, where, if
> anywhere, you have excess capacity, and what kind of choices you made when
> you purchased equipment and, in the case of Internet backlinks, services.
>
Karl
I have been watching session times since 1969 (yes that long!) At the
University, we have seen session times that vary between 20 minutes and 35
minutes over that 24 year time span! We have installed terminal servers
with SLIP in the last year. More than half of our dial up customers are
using SLIP. We now have session times of about 30 minutes. Supprise!!
I believe there is a human limit of about 30 minutes. If a user hangs on
longer, they are probably not doing much and therefore won't use much
bandwidth.
> --
> Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.COM) | MCSNet - Full Internet Connectivity (shell,
Dave Nordlund nordlund@ccstaff.cc.ukans.edu
University of Kansas 913/864-0450
Computing Services FAX 913/864-0485
Lawrence, KS 66045
