At 05:23 p.m. 25/02/2002 +1300, Frank March wrote:
I think the point is not to 'fill the pipes' but to explore the options that become available when bandwidth is not a restriction. Necessarily there is another condition: the bandwidth has to be essentially free. Empty pipes capably of handing bursty/intermittent/occasional traffic at very high transfer rates will allow for completely different long distance apps than we currently use.
In an earlier part of life, I worked on a network where the corona effect of every nut and bolt was a worry. It was a fast network with intermittent traffic (we had controllers watching TV to kick in gas turbines when the ads came on). Instability blacked out entire nations, routing was tricky and switching had to be checked 3 times before execution, cos "big things" going bang make an aweful mess. Besides they guys doing the switching could get killed (and did). Hair raising is a polite way of describing this work. Now we realised that not everyone wants this sort of fast pipe in their home. After all the 440KV towers filled most back yards with one foot, and how many homes REALLY do need 440KV with 2000 amps behind it ? yes thats close to a gigawatt of power. Thinking of IP, our pipes are getting faster. Gig NICs now cost the same as 56k modems and 10gig is here, with talk of 40/100 gig starting soon. But do you need it to your home ? Even with teenagers ? A very decent mpeg4 stream is going to take 700kbps, phones take 7 to 11kbps, so even with teenagers in teh average house with multiple phones each and watching several "channels" simultaneously, you can fit it in a 100mbps line. ie we have the technology already, just as we have 230V to homes and are satisfied. People who run 3 phase arc welders, and get JSRs big videos of course, get different pipes, but pay for it. So what about INET2 ? Well with lots of CPU cycles now available, fast pipes (say 100mbps to the home) and good codecs like mp4, we have what is needed. What we don't have is people playing with it. Why aren't we seeing medical tests with video ? or the "other applications" that INET2 is supposed to deliver ? I will wait for answers, but for now appologise for spraying that nasty 2.5mbps multicast stream out this afternoon..........I think I has it sussed now, altho the bloody box is spraying traffic all over my desk....... (this part gets us back on topic) rich richard.naylor(a)citylink.co.nz - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog