[Discuss] Off-Topic [IP] BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet? (fwd)

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

On 12/12/2011 5:33 PM, Gordon Marx wrote:
> On Dec 12, 2011, at 5:12 PM, Bill Horne<bill at horne.net>  wrote:
>
>> At some point, the Internet will need a major overhaul. For what I do, which is mostly email, it worked as originally designed. For what many ISP's and content providers are attempting to do, which is near-real-time content delivery, it can be "bent to fit" by adding ever-fatter pipes and ever-larger buffers, at the expense (as the OP pointed out) of degrading key performance metrics like latency.
> Hey, you should check out this startup in Kendall. They're called Akamai, they're 13 years old and have ~$1B in yearly revenue, and they deliver like 30+% of internet traffic without fattening pipes or degrading latency.
>

Sorry, I don't think that will scale. Akamai is like Edison's plan to 
deliver power: he wanted to put a dynamo on every third streetcorner in 
America, and while it's (obviously) possible to store multiple copies of 
static content on every third "electronic" streetcorner, that won't work 
for telephone traffic, nor for any other traffic that needs real- or 
near-real-time *bidirectional* capacity. You can't store a phone call 
for delivery three seconds later, let alone the three minutes it takes 
Akamai to "spool" a NetFlix program to my pc before I can watch it.

Bill

-- 
Bill Horne
339-364-8487