Re: [PLUG] Lag time.

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

> Walt Mankowski wrote:
>
> > I'm not on Comcast, but I also saw delays of about an hour earlier
> > today.  It hasn't been that common lately, but delays like this do
> > seem to happen sometimes on this list.

Posting lags are normally related to backbone network congestion and 
more frequently, lately,  to server activity. Lags fluctuate all over 
the clock.

I can't think of a list where I get "instantaneous" posts anymore, and 
very few where they appear, as what I would even consider, "quickly." 
(Except early Monday mornings - like about 4am.)

Today, the number of ISPs who "meddle with the mail" is increasing 
exponentially and rapidly!

There was an article in the Inquirer this week talking about problems 
people were having because of all the various anti-SPAM actions ISPs 
are taking now on both OUTGOING and incoming mail. And, from my 
experience, every one of these actions requires reading the entire text 
of the message. (Remember, not everyone sends 1K ASCII text messages. 
They are frequently full of multi-meg "attachments" which also get 
scanned.) That means that the ISPs outgoing mail server is as much, if 
not more, a bottleneck than the backbone congestion or the destination 
mail server. Then add in the fact that your incoming ISP is also now 
doing more SPAM filtering.

There are very few situations where folks are NOT using an ISP's mail 
relay for either incoming or outgoing mail, or both.

... It all adds up. And, despite what George Gilder claims, bandwidth 
is still finite. All of the various new services -- VoIP, Video 
streaming, Audio streaming, etc. didn't exist at all just a couple of 
years ago, now they are becoming wide spread and consuming bandwidth.

Note that this situation is likely to "only get worse." In that QOS 
demands and requirements will give precedence to VoIP and other 
streaming technologies over seriously asynchronous email. I have no 
trouble seeing a return to the days when the sendmail timers were 
measured in days because it often took that long for a message to be 
delivered because of connectivity and bandwidth issues.

There may be plenty of capacity in the major long-haul IP backbones, 
but packets rarely take the "most direct route" from source to 
destination.

"Competitors," like Comecast, have their own backbones and don't route 
packets to outsiders unless they have to ... it costs them money to do 
so. (A T1 interconnect is much cheaper than a T3 interconnect, etc.) 
Note that Telephony has operated this way since 1976 when Ma Bell was 
broken up, and data communications is no different.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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