Vint Cerf on Why TCP/IP Was So Long in Coming

whitehartstag writes "TCP/IP is 25 years old this year. Vint Cerf says there was a long development cycle for both TCP/IP and for X.25, and we'd have been using TCP/IP much sooner if TCP/IP had been more marketable. 'Over the years, we can come up with many examples both of where the best technology did (or did not) win and of how marketing has defined a service. For example, many of the "best" features of frame relay, such as the ability to use Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC) in addition to Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC) were never widely marketed because the pricing was too complex. Rather, the PVC was a simple replacement for a leased line at a fraction of the cost with better performance.'"

where's the content?

[jessecurry]

I know that there isn't much real content on the web anymore, but that's not even an article. Where the hell is the content?

Re:TCP/IP still needs a rewrite

[bendodge]

It seems to me like most of the things you listed as missing were things IPv6 was specifically designed to get rid of.

Re:no

[jd]

Customers are almost certain never to get IP Multicast, but (probably) not for technological reasons. It's easy to bill per stream, for unicast streams, but harder for multicast. And, let's face it, there are certain segments of the entertainment industry - not just the *AA's - that have a vested interest in providing heavily metered audio/video streams. Multicasting has the potential to slash revenue by an order or two of magnitude. It's also easier to guague interest (for advertising reasons) for unicast connections than for multicast. And since unicast demands more on the CPU and on the pipe, machine manufacturers and ISPs have financial incentives to encourage customers to use the least-efficient delivery format possible.

If the customers are the only ones who could gain, and everyone else would lose, then who is going to be insane enough to switch on multicast routing to the home?

Re:no

[Drishmung]

The benefit of multicast is to the network provider. Where the same stream needs to be sent to many (thousands) of customers, multicast has a huge benefit. In fact, for 'push' content delivery it is the only viable means of networking.

And cable has been able to deal with the pricing issues for decades. The content is encrypted, with multiple keys---one for each subscriber. Anyone else can receive the multicast, but it does them no good without the key. When you join the stream, you not only join at an IP level, you authorise against the broadcaster and your key is enabled. For which you are sent a bill.

So, content provider gets to sell content to consumer, and network provider reduces costs. Content provider also knows exactly who has received the content.

For unencrypted content your points are valid, however even there a strong economic case can be made for multicast. Each consumer pays for bandwidth, so there is no direct cost benefit of multicast for them. But, it is in the network provider's interest to reduce costs, and by reducing bandwidth, multicast does this. Finally however, the content provider also has to buy bandwidth from somewhere, namely their upstream provider. They also have to serve that content. The economic benefits of a single server and 100Mbps (multicast) vs tens/hundreds of servers and 10Gbps (unicast) are fairly compelling to potential video content providers, if not to traditional text/web providers.