<5 minutes on Challenges to Global Broadband Operability and Roles of GIBN

1. <5 minutes onChallenges to Global BroadbandOperability and Roles of GIBN David Williams GIBN Meeting, Wien Thursday, 3 December 1998 David.O.Williams@cern.ch Slides: http://nicewww.cern.ch/~davidw/public/GIBNWien.ppt

2. The dichotomy • Networking is simple - all users know what they want. (Fast, reliable, ubiquitous, lots of good services, and cheap) • It is only making this happen (internationally) which is hard

3. My two favourite themes (in this context) • The engineering costs of under-ocean bandwidth are inherently high. The distances are long, the engineering is much more complex than for over-land lines, and there are far fewer fibres on any given route. The engineering costs are 10-20x higher than overland. This ratio is staying constant as the technologies advance. • We have no sensible and/or serious mechanism in place for managing the upgrades of “public interconnects” (routing default traffic).

4. Defining the community • The perceived quality of a network depends closely on the community that is trying to use it. Such as:- • universities, research organisations of all types, molecular biologists, schools, homes, commerce, …. • Until you define your community, and the geographic scope, you don’t know what you want to optimise. • National definitions vary.

5. Access to fibre • All the signs are that serious progress on the GIBN (Global Interconnectivity of Broadband Network) front will depend on global access to fibre. • If we are serious we should make a credible presentation to a few fibre owners, asking for very cheap fibre world-wide for ~5 years. Project Oxygen, Global Crossing, and Worldcom MCI might be good places to start, but we should talk to any serious supplier willing to talk to us.

6. In the meantime….(for Europe) • Europe should especially foster collaborations with countries and/or regions who have interesting technologies and/or understand what cost-sharing means • 155 Mbps shared by Europe to Canada could/would be very interesting • And Europe needs to improve its connectivity to Japan, where cable connections going “directly” rather than via the USA should now be viable.

7. Things are not perfect (yet!) • Lots of good connectivity exists • And lots of very poor connectivity (even in the USA/N America) • Support efforts to measure and understand the Internet better • Let’s be honest about some of the packet loss and jittery delay that users see!

8. Fermi to Brown (15 April to 25 August) ?? Packet loss 16.15% in April, 0.05% in July. They changed their ISP!!

9. Stay away from Public Internet Exchanges!

10. Routed via vBNS (Hay to Perryman)

11. Routed via Washington, Dallas, Washington, NY(EUnet), NY(Qwest), Denver

12. Finally • Are we serious?? • If not, let’s not waste time • If we are, let’s start investing seriously in people and money for GIBN activities. Providing what the users know that they want is far harder than we are sometimes prepared to admit. • The problem is not with the technology, but finding enough effort to organise the politics and economics of international collaboration.