Even a $10M
upgrade won't fix
congested Internet
exchange points
Increase in packet loss has
MAEs scrambling for answers.
By Sandra Gittlen and Denise
Pappalardo
Network World Fusion, 11/7/97
What does $10 million get you?
Maybe only a Band-Aid if you're
operating some of the busiest
Internet exchange points in the
world.
That is what WorldCom, Inc. is
spending to fix MAE-East and
MAE-West, its two metropolitan
area exchange (MAE) points that
are buckling under the demand of
Internet service providers. But
according to most industry
observers, WorldCom's two-year
$10 million antidote will not be the
cure.
The dramatic growth of the Internet
increasingly translates into intense
packet loss, frequent switch
rebooting and overall network
congestion at the more than one
dozen MAEs and network access
points in operation. And that means
headaches for businesses that depend on the 'Net.
Dwight Gibbs, chief technical fool for Web-based financial
advisory firm Motley Fool, knows this firsthand. His users
accuse him of poor quality of service when Web pages are slow
to appear. He then shows them trace routes he has done to
track where slowdowns occur and points to congestion at the
MAEs, he said.
WorldCom and the ISPs have identified the problems as
head-of-line blocking, which causes pipes into the exchange
point to jam up, resulting in packets being dropped, and
congestion. Dropped packets mean ISPs have to dedicate more
resources to retransmitting, which, in turn, wastes bandwidth.
Nowhere is the dramatic growth of the Internet felt more
strongly than at WorldCom's MAE-East, in Vienna, Va.; the
busiest MAE. |
