• Markets within the US were open with government defined demarcation between Inter-eXchange-Carrier (IXC), Local-Exchange-Carrier (LEC) and the customer site.
• Mid-Tier US enterprises did not purchase carrier delivered managed services for sites within the US as they opted to leverage their own resources.
• Larger US enterprises were outsourcing their entire communications infrastructure to large integrators (e.g.

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is your friend....

...except when it's your enemy! Most of the time it's your friend because it's chock full of great features, but the best feature it has is congestion avoidance. Simply put, congestion avoidance was designed to allow a data transfer flow over an IP network to adapt to the size of bandwidth available while minimizing the loss of packets. Packet loss implies loss of efficiency, so TCP also minimizes waste.

Sometimes TCP is not your friend, though, and that has to do with the way the protocol acheives that efficiency. If you want all the gory details of how TCP works I would highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated by Rich Stevens, although the wikipedia entry linked above offers a reasonable summary. The key thing to understand is that congestion avoidance is acheived through the use of adjusting the size of the TCP window and that because TCP is very chatty the latency between the endpoints is a large factor in how quickly the window can be adjusted. As a result, the maximum data transfer speed is governed by window size, packet size, and round trip latency.

I found a very handy simplified algorithm for calculating TCP throughput over on Brad Hedlund's blog.

Throughput (bps) = TCP Window Size (bits) / Latency (s)Read more and comment...

1. The FCC’s jurisdiction is unclear and potentially boundless.  This amorphous jurisdiction can only lead to more uncertainty and confusion and negatively impact investment in IP. 
2. There is a vibrant competitive market in the Internet ecosystem for backbone and hosting services.  The FCC needs to be sure that any rules do not negatively impact that competition. 
3. The proposed rules, specifically the rule that prohibits carriers from charging content providers for prioritized access, undermine the FCC’s objectives with regards to the Internet.  If content providers cannot pay for prioritized access, then they may not be able to offer high-capacity, high-resolution applications such as telemedicine, distance education, etc.  (Some parties believe this rule will eliminate CDN providers.)

 

The motivations are varied, but three goals are at the core of clean-tech movement:

• Environment – reducing pollution, especially green house gas emissions 
• Economics – reducing energy import costs & creating jobs
• Security – ensuring our energy supplies cannot be cut off

• “E-commerce replaces retail stores with warehouses, which use one sixteenth the energy… [eliminating] the need for about 5 percent of commercial building space…”
• “Internet shopping saves delivery energy. Surface delivery uses a tenth as much energy as an average trip to the store by car; even overnight air uses 40 percent less fuel. Some products—software and music, for example—can be “delivered” digitally over the Internet.”
• “The Internet promotes greater use of home offices, enabling workers to avoid commuting and employers to reduce office space. The energy savings in transportation and office construction and operation more than offset the extra energy used in the home.”

I’ve recently been given the opportunity to write a blog for Global Crossing – a much larger audience in which to stand up on my soapbox and say all the things that have been bugging me about the Ethernet industry for years. But, I'm not going to do that.  Well, not today.

If you have read my blogs on http://www.carrierethernet.us.com or http://vpls.us you will recognize my posts – But for those of you who haven't read my posts, I am looking forward to your comments.

Anyway, that's not the reason that I came to talk to you today

The last conversation I had on my blog surrounded the newest carrier hotel / Ethernet connection point that CENX and Equinix have been presenting. They are providing the ability to connect with anybody that they can interconnect with to themselves, and in return they will provide the ability to connect with everybody else at that interconnection point. Driving costs and service provider profits down by creating a bottom feeding situation. Have you ever heard of the “Name your own price strategy” a couple of the mortgage vendors and a couple of the airline cheap ticket web sites were providing this service. What I think they envision is where a service provider has to bid on a customers connection and compete against all of our competition for price. The problem with this situation is until it becomes a commodity, or an even playing field, it’s not an applicable approach. Read more and comment...