[comp.protocols.tcp-ip] Possible ARPA segmentation next week? Danger, Will Robinson!

blumenth@BBN.COM (Steve Blumenthal) (12/23/88)

Gene,

Thanks for your note.  Please be sure to notify the ARPANET NOC
at BBN about the power outage.  Their telephone number is 1-800-492-4992.
I'm not sure that the controllers are regular readers of the tcp-ip
mailing list.  Besides the three cross country links being carried as
streams by the Wideband Net, there are two 56kb/s point-to-point VSAT
lines between PSNs at MIT and SRI.  Since these are also satellite
links, they will also incurr the 250-300 msec delays as do the Wideband
Net stream trunks. 

I believe that time constants in the ARPANET PSN routing software have
been adjusted to favor putting traffic over the Wideband Net streams and
VSAT lines, even though they represent a real higher packet delay.  This
was done to balance the load on the cross country links and to keep the
only terrestrial path from being congested.

Under light load conditions, the loss of the terrestrial path would
probbaly be more noticeable than under moderate to heavy load.

Steve Blumenthal
BBN