Re: Info on MAE-EAST

["dave o'leary" <doleary () cisco com>]

At 7:00 -0800 1/16/97, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
> I can't claim to have recent numbers that suggest otherwise, but, some
> historical information might at least be interesting.  In the early 80s, I
> did a good deal of X.25 capacity planning.  At what was then GTE Telenet,
> we found that up to 50% of our traffic stayed local in large cities.  The
> larger the city, the more that seemed to stay local...this was especially
> obvious in New York, where a great deal of financial data flowed.

remember that in the early 80's you basically couldn't lease a T1
from AT&T (I think it was 82 or so when they were first tariffed?)
(watch out for that DC voltage...ouch! :-).
also DDS services were scarce, etc.  So (expensive) low speed analog
was the option for leased lines - and private networks were rare.
Since then of course the fallout from Judge Greene has changed some
things, and it is cheap and easy to put up a DS0 across town - the
cost justification vs. per packet charges is a lot different.

> Now, these old statistics reflect mainframe-centric traffic, and more
> private-to-private than arbitrary public access.  The latter is much more
> characteristic of Internet traffic.
>
> SNA and X.25 tended to emphasize the ability to fine tune access to a
> limited number of well-known resources, with relatively well-understood
> traffic patterns.  The Internet, however, has emphasized arbitrary and
> flexible connectivity, possibly to the detriment of performance tuning and
> reliability.

well the strategies for performance tuning are certainly different.

[stuff cut]
> Web cacheing would seem to encourage traffic to stay local.

ahhh....yup.

                                                dave


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