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The Internet Isn't Working

posted by janrinok on Thursday June 10 2021, @12:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-infrastructure dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Spiked:

If life ever returns to normal, one thing no one will miss from the lockdown era is the 'TV goldfish'. For over a year, we've watched the disembodied, pixelated faces of contributors to live TV mouth their words out of sync with their audio, gulping away as if in a private fish tank. This isn't the exception for internet video, it's the norm.

John Day is one of the internet's greybeard founding fathers. For a decade he has been advancing a set of improvements to the current mainstream internet protocols. His proposals – called RINA (Recursive Internetwork Architecture) – revisit and build on Louis Pouzin's founding concept of datagrams (data packets). Simplifying these features allowed the original inter-networking protocols (IP) to get out of the door in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed for the rapid growth of the internet. But the current system we have – TCP/IP – is holding back new innovation.

See also: Internet outage illustrates lack of resilience at heart of critical services
The Guardian view on the internet outage: we need resilience, not just efficiency

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by tyler on Friday June 11 2021, @01:00PM (1 child)

    by tyler (6335) on Friday June 11 2021, @01:00PM (#1144233) Homepage

    I completely disagree with the idea that TCP/UDP/IP are the problem here. Most audio/video player implementation buffer the AV data before playing it. Their problem is their software, drivers, or hardware.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @03:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @03:59AM (#1144486)

    It is a combinations of a *lot* of things. But to put it in perspective if you drop 1 out of 1000 packets in TCP you can kiss 10% of your perf away instead of what you think it would be. 1 in 100 and you will see terrible perf.

    My current refrain for most people is to look at their network gear for 'crappy webex'. Almost every time there are dropped packets. Most of the upper protocols back off into terrible routines or just turn into a stutter mess. TCP will back down the rate and outstanding packets *very* quickly, slaughtering perf.

    They fix their dropped packet issue and everything starts working nicely for them. One dude it was his wireless nic card. Another it was his ISP. Another it was his router. There is only so much the software can do if the TCP stack has throttled you down to nothing. Just 'working around it' with QUIC/UDP is an interesting idea. But has not been proven to work yet and may have some of the same mistakes.