As one of the early workers on network congestion, much of what he says is right. We really have no idea how to deal with congestion in the middle of the network. The best we can do is have more bandwidth in the middle than at the edges. Fortunately, the fiber optic and hardware router people have done so well at providing bandwidth that the backbone has mostly been able to keep ahead of the edges.
We never dreamed of a connection with over 10,000 packets in flight. Cutting the congestion window in half on a packet loss and ramping it back up one packet at a time was something I came up with around 1984. That does need to be rethought, and it has been.
Sounds like an interesting story, you were working with Van Jacobsen, and made the suggestion to him? (since he's usually credited with that form of congestion control, folks might appreciate a little more explanation).
Was there an unstated assumption that packet sizes might scale up with network speeds? (and not get trapped at the original 10mbit ethernet frame size as it turned out). Today we send teeny micropackets relative to link speeds, and increasing by one packet at a time is (in retrospect) a weird outcome. But like Chesterton's fence, it's nice to know how it got there.
What feels comfortable now is going to feel uncomfortable in like a decade. Especially if VR stuff begins to hit. The abominable Comcast is already enacting data caps, maybe due to limits already being reached.
Interesting to see this paper making HN. I think it has stood the test of time reasonably well - it was written in about four hours one morning under rather unfortunate circumstances - I was stuck on a train that hit a vehicle at a crossing.
I'm interested in what HN folks think has changed. What are today's urgent problems, and what are just annoying ones that will cost time and money to work around, but aren't critical? How do they differ from those of 10 years ago? Arguably, some I discussed back then have only grown in importance, with no solution in sight - for example, DDoS attacks. Whereas some, like address space exhaustion, look like being adequately addressed, as IPv6 is finally rolling out (only took 20 years!).
I'm wondering if your opinions on the difficulty of introducing new protocols have changed over the past decade. For example, Bittorrent has taken off, and while I used to have to manually configure ports on my NAT to allow Bittorrent to pass through, I no longer need to do so. Universal PnP seems to have taken care of that (at the cost of some security).
Did anyone think about applications with time-sensitive arrival back then (e.g. VoIP), and have any implementation ideas that never made it out the door?
The fragility of BGP is one area that I have been concerned about for some time. We have already seen instances of misconfiguration that black hole entire countries, but if someone wanted to bring down the Internet intentionally they could do a lot of damage with just a few hacked ISPs.
Thanks, for me this was mostly another illustration how to make a website that doesn't.
Please give me at least a chance to get a plain pdf (or html) that I can read (and click into) without content bumping forth and back and my computer grinding to a halt.
Oh man, I emailed the creators a year ago when they first released the site, encouraging them to make the frontend open source so the performance and layout issues could be fixed by the community (including myself, there are some easy bug fixes I wanted to submit). Back then, they were still deciding what the direction was going to be for the library. A year later, it seems they've opted for the closed-source, no improvements path unfortunately.
I still subscribe, since the papers are interesting, but the website needs some love.
This seems a bit harsh. As far as I understand the purpose of this website is to make papers easier to understand. I think it accomplishes that. They are not even trying to show you ads. how are you helping?...
Also, they might have restrictions about distribution of papers. Youtube also doesn't have a download link next to every video.
Looking at it from a network protocol level is one view. From another perspective the internet (whether ipv4 or v6) is a complicated set of peering relationships between ASes and business entities. It takes clueful and experienced people with "enable" on the core and agg routers who also understand the economics of transit, peering, IXes, transport, dark and WDM systems to build a proper ISP.
The internet is only as fragile as you build it. I have seen too many ISPs running really important stuff through POPs where everything is 1+0.
In the early web days (mid-1990s) Bob Metcalfe(invertor of Ethernet) humorously the internet would collapse any day from increasing traffic. Aint happened yet.
Wow! 42 comments on an article titled, "Why the internet ONLY JUST works" (emphasis added), and the word "security" occurs once, and the words "malware", "privacy", "malicious", "ransomware", "hack" and "cybercrime" don't show up at all.
Is there another internet out there that I don't know about? If not maybe the title should be "Why the internet only just stinks"!
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
We never dreamed of a connection with over 10,000 packets in flight. Cutting the congestion window in half on a packet loss and ramping it back up one packet at a time was something I came up with around 1984. That does need to be rethought, and it has been.
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|9 years ago|reply
Was there an unstated assumption that packet sizes might scale up with network speeds? (and not get trapped at the original 10mbit ethernet frame size as it turned out). Today we send teeny micropackets relative to link speeds, and increasing by one packet at a time is (in retrospect) a weird outcome. But like Chesterton's fence, it's nice to know how it got there.
[+] [-] w8rbt|9 years ago|reply
We can call you the Saw Tooth Guy, or the Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease Guy. We'll let you pick.
[+] [-] abysmallyideal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhandley|9 years ago|reply
I'm interested in what HN folks think has changed. What are today's urgent problems, and what are just annoying ones that will cost time and money to work around, but aren't critical? How do they differ from those of 10 years ago? Arguably, some I discussed back then have only grown in importance, with no solution in sight - for example, DDoS attacks. Whereas some, like address space exhaustion, look like being adequately addressed, as IPv6 is finally rolling out (only took 20 years!).
[+] [-] quanticle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telesilla|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|9 years ago|reply
DDoS problem becomes pressing now with the emergence of IoT. Still no general solution though.
[+] [-] jandrese|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gone35|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstimpfle|9 years ago|reply
Please give me at least a chance to get a plain pdf (or html) that I can read (and click into) without content bumping forth and back and my computer grinding to a halt.
[+] [-] orivej|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathancahill|9 years ago|reply
I still subscribe, since the papers are interesting, but the website needs some love.
[+] [-] van_gaal|9 years ago|reply
Also, they might have restrictions about distribution of papers. Youtube also doesn't have a download link next to every video.
[+] [-] garaetjjte|9 years ago|reply
It is really that hard to just serve PDF instead of stupid javascript filled browsers.
[+] [-] clock_tower|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zodPod|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canada_dry|9 years ago|reply
http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/
Some very good reading.
[+] [-] walrus01|9 years ago|reply
The internet is only as fragile as you build it. I have seen too many ISPs running really important stuff through POPs where everything is 1+0.
[+] [-] powera|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 56245623456|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkz|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] john_gulliver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hNewsLover99|9 years ago|reply
Is there another internet out there that I don't know about? If not maybe the title should be "Why the internet only just stinks"!