Saturday, March 1, 2008
Lower Latency
Not only is higher bandwidth a goal, but also lower latency. Interactive use of the Internet, such as commands to and responses from remote systems, suffers when latency increases due to too many "hops" or due to congestion in any of the "hops" along the path the command and response traffic takes. In practice, we find that non-interactive traffic can cause interactive traffic to become frustratingly slow. The technical solutions proposed to help minimize this problem involve policy-based routing, also known as "Quality of Service."
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Well, latency improves, as equipment gets replaced by newer, faster equipment. But the chief problem I was after here was that Los Alamos residential internet to LANL at the time went at least through Albuquerque, and frequently through cities a thousand or more miles away. That multiplied the latency by a factor of up to 5 or 6, at best, and by dozens at times. And, now, eight years later, it still goes through at least Albuquerque. However, LANL has agreed to "peer" so traffic between LA Commnet and LANL can stay here in town. But, currently that traffic would best go through County fiber along Trinity Drive, using the Annex to connect. And the latest I have from the County about that, probably around a year ago, is that, "We're going to tear down the Annex soon, so there's no point in adding anything there." Not exactly obstructionist, certainly not helpful, I guess I'd grade that response as somewhere between unhelpful and mildly hostile.
One of my points in pushing the "peering" is that without it, Los Alamos businesses are paying for that LANL traffic in the fees they pay to ship it to Albuquerque (or beyond) and back. In fact, LANL is abusing federal funds, too, by paying fees for their side, too. But, it turns out that traffic between LANL and LA Commnet customers is pretty light in the grand scheme. And I suppose the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) media tappers would like to have as much local traffic to watch as they can, just in case it provides a leg up on the next terrorist event.
And, latency is fairly tightly related to locality, too. The whole world should improve the tendency of the internet to ship packets halfway across the country to get down the block. Zip code has done that to the USPS (United States Postal Service,) too, and of course the difference in latency there can be a week or more!
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