<5 minutes on Challenges to Global Broadband Operability and Roles of GIBN David Williams GIBN Meeting, Wien Thursday, 3 December 1998 Slides:

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

My two favourite themes (in this context) n 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. n We have no sensible and/or serious mechanism in place for managing the upgrades of public interconnects (routing default traffic).

Defining the community n 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, …. n Until you define your community, and the geographic scope, you dont know what you want to optimise. n National definitions vary.

Access to fibre n All the signs are that serious progress on the GIBN (Global Interconnectivity of Broadband Network) front will depend on global access to fibre. n 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.

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

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

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

Stay away from Public Internet Exchanges!

Routed via vBNS (Hay to Perryman)

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

Finally n Are we serious?? n If not, lets not waste time n If we are, lets 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. n The problem is not with the technology, but finding enough effort to organise the politics and economics of international collaboration.