[NNagain] FCC NOI due dec 1 on broadband speed standards

Jack Haverty jack at 3kitty.org
Tue Nov 14 14:27:28 EST 2023


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 at 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 at 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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>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
>>> Vint Cerf
>>> Google, LLC
>>> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
>>> Reston, VA 20190
>>> +1 (571) 213 1346
>>>
>>>
>>> until further notice
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
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>> _______________________________________________
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