Re: Metcalf and Other Net.Fogies

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Alan Olsen writes:
> Metcalfe may have a valid prediction here.

Metcalfe is talking out his ass. He's reached the "old geezer who's
impeding his own field" stage. Many of his articles seem to be written
as though no one was trying to fix problems.

> When I run traceroutes, the blockage is in MCI or Sprintnet land.

How do you manage to determine where you are losing bandwidth using
traceroute? That must be a mighty powerful traceroute to do that --
most traceroutes I've seen are hard pressed just to find out what the
connectivity path is.

> The bandwidth to the net has been oversold.

Always the case. Big deal. Bandwidth is still increasing pretty
fast. There are, naturally, growing pains, but the outages and
bandwidth situation are pretty good, all things considered. Compared
to the way things were eight or nine years ago they are amazing;
compared to four years ago they are still astoundingly better.

Now if we could only go back in time and shoot the folks responsible
for HTTP before they thought of it we might even be able to do
something about the packet loss situation -- if HTTP just played nice
with TCP and Netscape didn't spawn simultaneous TCPs the situation
would be much improved.

Perry