Subject: [Ieprep] draft-ietf-ieprep-requirements-00.txt

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 16:38:33 -0400

An underlying issue with this document is the assumption that
backbones might be under-provisioned.

	Many large backbones are in fact over-provisioned.  That is,
they have more capacity than they have maximum potential offered load.
In many cases, this capacity is built on multiple wide-area SONET
rings, so that even an earthquake or smallish tactical nuclear bombs
would not cause them to be underprovisioned.[1]

	In such a network, QoS is not really a meaningful concept.  It
seems to me that an operator with such a network might well be able
to provide the services desired for IEPREP without making any special
provisions in their network (other than ensuring robust overprovisioning
continues to be the case).

	That possibility is not reflected in this draft and seems like
a major omission to me.

Ran
[email-masked]

[1] To be clear, most congestion and packet loss today occurs in the
access portion of the Internet, which is often operated by a smaller
Tier-2/3/4 provider different from the Tier-1 transit/backbone operator.
In this situation, QoS might be useful inside the Tier-N operator
(e.g. on particular access links that aren't overprovisioned by the 
Tier-N
operator), but QoS would likely not be meaningful inside the Tier-1 
backbone.

[2] Experience to date is that the Internet has not suffered from extreme
traffic loads (i.e. more than the Internet can handle) even in the 
presence
of earthquakes (e.g. LA, Loma Prieta) or terrorism (e.g. on Sept 11th).
In fact, during such situations the "best effort" Internet has continued
to work quite well, thanks to a robust Internet Architecture.  This fact
is also not reflected in the above draft -- and seems like a bug.

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 15:11:44 -0700

At 04:38 PM 6/28/2002 -0400, RJ Atkinson wrote:
>Many large backbones are in fact over-provisioned.

I point this out in the packet marking draft, and point out the places 
where one might expect to find an underprovisioned network (access and 
inter-campus links). Are you saying that the model needs to be repeated 
here? I'm quite willing to see an up-to-date traffic assessment in the draft.