RE: I think I jinxed Sprint

[Mathew Butler <mbutler () tonbu com>]

I thought that routers were supposed to send ICMP Source-Quench messages
when they got congested?

Or is this something that the proponents of QoS didn't decide on?

-Mat

-----Original Message-----
From: Roeland Meyer [mailto:rmeyer () mhsc com]
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 8:58 AM
To: 'Sean Donelan'; nanog () merit edu
Subject: RE: I think I jinxed Sprint

The internet is a lot less forgiving wrt outages then the telco. The telco
can have a circut outage, re-route to another circuit, and the customer
never sees an availability gap. Also, a total outage, during reduced traffic
times, and no customer ever misses a dial-tone because they aren't trying to
get one, is not an outage in telco terms. The internet, on the other hand,
may have similar issues, unless we start talking streaming video, streaming
audio, and voice over IP. In those cases, packet losses can make a serious
mess of things. Also, congestion is treated differently between the two
systems. Telcos will actually return a fast-busy when a switch becomes
congested. The internet simply starts dropping packets. You can actually
hear the latter when using www.dialpad.com or MS-Netmeeting (both of which,
I use extensively).