[ih] Internet/Wireless Principle of Levelness

[Jack Haverty via Internet-history]

On 11/11/19 8:31 AM, Dave Taht via Internet-history wrote:

> And - of course! it's got the "deep buffers" providers require.

I'm just a User now.  Just last year I helped a friend, another User,
figure out why his "gaming" app, which depends on interactive behavior
across the net, was sometimes unusable.  I was curious, since I also
sometimes see visual and audio artifacts on streaming TV content, making
TV sometimes similarly unusable, even though I have 150+ Mb/sec internet
service.   We Users tend to think "Oh, the net's broken again, they're
probably working on fixing it".

Using the ancient network management tools, we tracked the cause down to
latency.  The typical latency we measured across the net was 100 msec or
less.  But occasionally it would jump to several seconds and stay there
for a while.   I was surprised to see that zero packets were being lost,
but many were delayed as much as 30 seconds.  Without the ability to dig
inside the boxes, I can only speculate that such behavior at the IP
level was what made the gaming app unusable, and could cause those
artifacts I see in my TV video and audio. 

My friend tried complaining to his ISPs' tech support, but they all said
their service was working fine.  Perhaps that is a consequence of the
"Levelness" that now makes Users' applications involve many different
service and equipment providers?

Is this latency how Users now see the effects of those "deep buffers"?  
Why would providers require a feature that makes their customers
unhappy.....?

I'm still just being curious about the History of the Internet,
especially how its service evolved -- as seen by the Users.

/Jack


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