On 8 Jun 2004, at 20:15, Juha Saarinen wrote:
Back during the trans-pacific bandwidth squeeze of 1998/9 it seemed like transparent caching was a necessary evil that would help accommodate growth in customer demand for traffic until Southern Cross arrived. Southern Cross arrived some time ago, is evidently not full, and yet people are still forcing customers to use caches. Why is that?
Rhetorical question?
No, actually.
International bandwidth still costs a lot, perhaps.
This (and Jonathan's answer) assumes that the introduction of caches somehow conserves bandwidth. I've never seen that in practice; the upstream pipes were still as full as ever the last time I watched caches being added to an ISP.
Even so, isn't there a slight win for NZ Internet users going through a transparent cache, as in theory at least it should speed up "the Intarweb" as content is being fetched from a local cache instead of 150-350ms away?
That caches improve perceived performance for users is a reasonable reason to the original question, I suppose. I've never heard of anybody using transparent caches without a regular stream of helpdesk driven exception handling, though, so there's a cost to that performance, both to the customer and to the ISP whose helpdesk phone is ringing. Joe