[e2e] Queue size of routers

[Vadim Antonov]

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, RJ Atkinson wrote:

> On Monday, Jan 20, 2003, at 22:33 America/Montreal, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> > 3) because of smoothing of the flows, the probability of congestion in
> > backbone circuits is relatively low
> 
> 	A more direct and proximal cause for the low probability of
> backbone link congestion is that most large ISPs deliberately
> over-engineer their backbones to have visibly more capacity than the
> max offered load.  No amount of flow smoothing could counteract
> congestion caused by an absence of over-provisioning of backbone
> links.

Well, it wasn't alwsys like that (I remember times when backbones were
overloaded by a factor of 3 to 10), and the network was still useable.
I think the current backbone overengineering is more an artifact of ILEC's
feet dragging on broadband access deployment than a deliberate engineering
decision.

--vadim