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ARPANET Co-Founder Calls for Flow Management
An anonymous reader writes "Lawrence Roberts, co-founder of ARPANET and inventor of packet switching, today published an article in which he claims to solve the congestion control problem on the Internet. Roberts says, contrary to popular belief, the problem with congestion is the networks, not Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Rather than overhaul TCP, he says, we need to deploy flow management, and selectively discard no more than one packet per TCP cycle. Flow management is the only alternative to peering into everyone's network, he says, and it's the only way to fairly distribute Internet capacity."
So now we actually DO need to make the Internet more like a series of tubes??? brain asplode
Kind of like saying, "When did Chuck Norris become a bad ass." He's always been a bad ass, just like the universe has always existed.
Sure, anyone can get on, but YOUR packets have to ride in back.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yes, you are precisely right. As things stand now, there's no good reason why tier one networks need to buy vast amounts of new routing infrastructure - what they already own works just fine. With this new plan, they will all have to buy ten times more hardware, which will return us all to the glory days of the dot com era. Or at least will return Lawrence Roberts to the glory days of the dot com era.
Why, did you think this plan had something to do with providing better service to end-users? When does that ever happen?
-Graham