Slashdot Mirror
Intenet2 Backbone Upgrades
An anonymous reader "Looks like Abilene, the backbone for Internet2 will join Canada's CA*Net3 and Europe's GEANT as one of the fastest research networks on the planet. According to this press release, Internet2 will be deploying 11 of Juniper network's freshly announced T640 platform. These puppies can cram 32 OC-192 (or 128 OC-48) interfaces into a single chassis. All in half a rack, too!" I'm
sure those students are very happy with their ping times. Meanwhile in the
real world... ;)
Er - possibly because realistic timekeeping wouldn't be possible otherwise?
Despite the throughput of these lines their latency will still be high when talking about transatlantic distances.
As far as I understood it a lot of this bandwidth will be used for real time work as well as transfer of large amounts of data - for real time you need to know latencies.
A fast line in Gbps is not necessarily a fast line in pings - 6 million modems will give you a 192Gbps connection - but the ping times will be stupid.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
You would expect the slashdot *editors* would have discovered the distinction between latency and troughput by now. 128 (or whatever) OC-12 running in parallell does not give you a lower ping-time than a single one. (unless your high ping is caused by congestion)
What it does is allow you to transfer more data. Consider this analogy: Sending a hundred postcards at once doesn't make your message get there faster, but it *does* give you space for a longer message.
Ofcourse Internet2 is also built to have low latencies, however the humongous bandwith doesn't contribute directly to this, except as in making congestion less likely.
During the good old days of networking when I was at Virginia Tech, they had a pretty interesting setup. As far as I understood, VT used to sit on a NAP on the I2. The closer you were to the NAP, the fatter your pipe. There were some plans to open the NAP up for local residental access since most of the Blacksburg residents were students and faculty. I don't know if that was ever accomplished or not.
:-)
:-/
Anyways, before digressing, VT's outgoing pipe had two logical interface. Any packets bound to universites or other educational institutions that had access to the I2 via their local NAP points, would go through the then established oc-3. (The pipe might be fatter now). Any other packets that were bound for networks outside of these destinations were forwarded through the dual t-3 that was used for 'all other traffic'.
I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.
I believe other schools share the same network setup as VT and i wouldn't be surprised many of those once old pipes have now been upgraded to fatter ones. Then again, MCI does have a lot of dark fiber laid around the AMTRAK rails that has yet lit up.
However, despite with all this nice connection, I was recently told by several Virginia Tech on-campus residents that their connection has been capped up. I did some digging around and I believe that CNS is now capping the wall connections with the use of the catalyst 6500 catalysts from Cisco which I belive can limit network usage from reading all their marketing material... lol
Bottom line: Even if your organization or institutions had fat pipes to external networks, if your network capacity is limited from the point where you plug in your RJ45... don't expect to see blazing speeds).
BTW, as far as I know, they got the ports to the residents dorms set up to 10mpbs half duplex... ewwwww......
Perhaps a technical solution like the Internet2's QBone Scavenger Service can relieve the problem without limits imposed by administrators (although these administrators certainly have a right to impose limits). QBSS is like running nice(1) on Unix: you declare that you're not in a big hurry to get your data and that your traffic can be fit in around more important traffic. Of course, it requires end-user cooperation, but most users of file-sharing apps are capable of respecting the network and making a compromise.