Subject: (ION) Advantage of best effort

From: Albert Manfredi <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 18:31:14 -0500

Happy New Year everyone!

The December issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE is dedicated to
all the topics we love. Good reading.

I recall that not too long ago, one Steve Deering was extolling the
advantages of best effort, packet-switched nets, compared with
circuit-based schemes such as ATM. You don't get busy signals, just
degraded service, as things get congested.

Hmmm. Here's what I just got back from www.microsoft.com (which
doesn't even use RSVP):

             HTTP/1.0 Server Too Busy

Don't know how much closer you can get to a busy signal. Whatever.

Bert
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From: "Vijay Srinivasan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 19:07:24 -0500

Bert,

Happy New Year to you, as well.

In the example you cite, it could very well be that the net was not
congested, but the server just didn't have enough horsepower to handle all
the requests it had received.  Without further information on the state of
the network etc, this doesn't prove or disprove that packet-switched nets
are better than circuit switched nets, or vice versa, imho.
 
Regards,
- Vijay

----------
> From: Albert Manfredi <[email-masked]>
> To: ION Group <[email-masked]>
> Subject: (ION) Advantage of best effort
> Date: Wednesday, January 07, 1998 6:31 PM
> 
> Happy New Year everyone!
>