In the beginning days of the Arpanet, circa early 1970s, ARPA made a policy decision about use of the Arpanet. First, Arpa Program Managers, located on the East Coast of the US, were assigned computer accounts on USC-ISIA, located on the West Coast in LA. Thus to do their work, exchanging email, editting documents, and such, they had to *use* the Arpanet to connect their terminals in Washington to the PDP-10 in California - 3000 miles away.

Second, ARPA began requiring all of their contractors (researchers at Universities etc.) to interact with Arpa using email and FTP.   If your site was "on the Arpanet", you had to use the Arpanet. If you wanted your proposal for next year's research to be funded, you had to submit your proposal using the net.

This policy caused a profound attention, by everyone involved, to making the Arpanet work and be useful as a collaboration tool.

JCR Licklider (aka Lick) was my advisor at MIT, and then my boss when I joined the Research Staff. Lick had been at ARPA for a while, promoting his vision of a "Galactic Network" that resulted in the Arpanet as a first step. At MIT, Lick still had need for lots of interactions with others.   My assignment was to build and operate the email system for Lick's group at MIT on our own PDP-10. Lick had a terminal in his office and was online a lot.   If email didn't work, I heard about it.   If the Arpanet didn't work, BBN heard about it.

This pressure was part of Arpa policy.   Sometimes it's referred to as "eating your own dog food" -- i.e., making sure your "dog" will get the same kind of nutrition you enjoy.   IMHO, that pressure policy was important, perhaps crucial, to the success of the Arpanet.

In the 70s, meetings still occurred, but a lot of progress was made through the use of the Arpanet.   You can only do so much with email and file interactions. Today, the possibilities for far richer interactions are much more prevalent.   But IMHO they are held back, possibly because no one is feeling the pressure to "make it work".   Gigabit throughputs are common, but why does my video and audio still break up...?

It's important to have face-to-face meetings, but perhaps if the IETF scheduled a future meeting to be online only, whatever needs to happen to make it work would happen? Perhaps...

Even a "game" might drive progress. At Interop '92, we resurrected the old "MazeWars" game using computers scattered across the show exhibit halls. The engineers in the control room above the floor felt the pressure to make sure the Game continued to run. At the time, the Internet itself was too slow for enjoyable gameplay at any distance.   Will the Internet 30 years later work?

Or perhaps the IETF, or ISOC, or someone could take on a highly visible demo involving non-techie end users.   An online meeting of the UN General Assembly?   Or some government bodies - US Congress, British Parliament, etc.

Such an event would surface the issues, both technical and policy, to the engineers, corporations, policy-makers, and others who might have the ability and interest to "make it work".

Jack

On 11/14/23 10:10, Sebastian Moeller wrote:

Hi Jack,

On Nov 14, 2023, at 13:02, Jack Haverty via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

If video conferencing worked well enough, they would not have to all get together in one place and would instead hold IETF meetings online ...?

	[SM] Turns out that humans are social creatures, and some things work better face-to-face and in the hallway (and if that is only building trust and sympathy) than over any remote technology.

Did anyone measure latency?   Does anyone measure throughput of "useful" traffic - e.g., excluding video/audio data that didn't arrive in time to be actually used on the screen or speaker?

	[SM] Utility is in the eye of the beholder, no?

Jack Haverty


On 11/14/23 09:25, Vint Cerf via Nnagain wrote:

if they had not been all together they would have been consuming tons of video capacity doing video conference calls....

:-))
v


On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 10:46 AM Livingood, Jason via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
On the subject of how much bandwidth does one household need, here's a fun stat for you.

 
At the IETF’s 118th meeting last week (Nov 4 – 10, 2023), there were over 1,000 engineers in attendance. At peak there were 870 devices connected to the WiFi network. Peak bandwidth usage:

	• Downstream peak ~750 Mbps
	• Upstream ~250 Mbps
 
From my pre-meeting Twitter poll (https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1720060429311901873):

<image001.png>

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