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Technology Stocks : Frank Coluccio Technology Forum - ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ftth who wrote (760)	12/18/1999 10:13:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1782

re: what is "it?" Hello Dave, you're correct, I was far too vague about it. Your last reply (uplink to this) was helpful, however, in allowing me to see it. All notions concerning how to assess and prepare for the situations you've cited are predicated on someone doing the provisioning of services and making allowances for ample bandwidth and protocols to ensure that the implied SLA-like metrics can be met. Is it someone? or a multitude of providers? or the sum total of all providers? who must be working in concert to effect these ends? Attempts recently to break away from the central Internet schema by some carriers (FON's ION, ATHM, MCI's onNET, and others) lend contrast to the concerted approach on the public 'net of which I speak, since these carriers portend to deliver a form of end-to-end service over their own facilities, for the most part, excepting those situations where "calls" have to be made to public servers for information not yet available on their own. Even these are only one-time, or several-time events, however, as their caching schemes would take care of subsequent hits, on-net. Increasingly, options are becoming available to select carrier schemes which fall somewhere in between these two extremes, whether we know about them, or not. Also, "acceleration" schemes are being used to offset deficiencies in absolute bandwidth availability. The latter would appear to be leveraging off of remote caching sites and shared bandwidth resources through peering agreements, but this is not always the case, either. Some service providers see fit to utilize their own private virtual links in these schemes between their own nodes, instead. In effect, they are using high-capacity private line trunks to deliver Internet services between their major nodes, an oxymoronic predicament.. if ever there was one. But one which is gaining in popularity daily, especially among B2B providers. Since there are so many different ways of providing bandwidth --some altogether sovereign, and some co-dependent using shared means-- then it would stand to reason that there must be a multitude of ways in which to ensure the quality metrics you've covered. But this is not the case. Most of the time Kentucky Windage and a Prayer are used, using recently available traffic trends analyses, instead. And it is no wonder that this should be the case, with over 15,000 service providers worldwide, and counting, all of whose networks at one time or another you may have cause to broach. Attempting to come up with a single solution reply to you that would meet the criteria of all possible permutations of the above would be futile, if not arrogant, of me. For the moment it appears to be eminently logical that oversupplying bandwidth is the only safe measure that could be taken in the shared domain, especially since many of the above providers' methods of delivering QoS are not compatible with those with whom they either peer or ultimately connect to somewhere along the line. In the end it may not come down to the most ingenious set of protocols, as much as it might depend on pure practicality. Regards, Frank