[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Bob Purvy]

I should note here that we were addressing a specific niche, not the whole
world as the IETF must:

A private WAN, from some branch of a company to a HQ network. They were
paying for the WAN, so if someone was clogging it up with non-essential
traffic (as they defined "non-essential" of course) that was a problem.

On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 3:46 PM Bob Purvy <bpurvy at gmail.com> wrote:

> well, 23 years later it can be revealed Packeteer *did* break all the
> rules, and the customers didn't care.
>
> No, we didn't use the TOS bits. The Packet Shaper had its own set of
> policies that users would tweak, e.g. to guarantee bandwidth or limit
> recreational apps during work hours (Stanford's network used this, in
> particular).
>
> It did it by modifying the window size and/or delaying the acks. No
> queueing. One might object "that won't work" but in fact it did.
>
> On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 3:18 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> I do remember that there were experiments over the years, and at least a
>> few RFCs defining meanings for the values of that TOS field we put in
>> the IP header.   "Stable latency" could have been a useful type of
>> service, making a virtual circuit look more like an old-school actual
>> circuit.   I'm not sure if it's in any of those RFCs, or the similar
>> mechanisms which I gather have been defined in IPV6.
>>
>> Some of those RFCs (and TOS specifications) might even have made it to
>> becoming a "standard".   But IMHO the history of the Internet should
>> focus on what happened "in the field" of the Internet we all use
>> today.   It's hard for me as a user to tell, but I personally haven't
>> seen any evidence that any OS, or application, uses those TOS settings,
>> or that any ISP and/or router manufacturer has equipment that behaves
>> differently depending on the TOS settings. There have been "test the
>> net" services around for a while, primarily measuring throughput, but
>> recently I've seen a few that at least report on latency.   Still
>> haven't seen any ISP or equipment vendor touting their products'
>> abilities to offer different types of service.   Perhaps that's even
>> illegal now given "net neutrality"?
>>
>> So it seems that the TOS functionality of IPV4 may have been evolved a
>> bit with some experimentation that occurred, but it doesn't seem to have
>> gotten into the live Internet.
>>
>> That's one thing that led me to the observation that the History of the
>> Internet should include what didn't happen, and why.
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>>
>> On 8/25/21 12:54 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> > On 8/25/2021 12:13 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> >> Low latency was also important for things like conversational voice,
>> >
>> > Given the new ability to be interactive with a range of 'users', there
>> > was experimentation about usability issues.  Lower latency has obvious
>> > benefit.  But one experiment demonstrated it was not an absolute.
>> >
>> > Given an experience with significantly /variable/ latency, where the
>> > average was lower latency, versus an experience with very stable
>> > latency, but at a higher average, users preferred the latter.
>> >
>> > d/
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>
>