Subject: Re: PPPmux and MP

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2000 12:52:12 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>

> > Both of the proposals strain to remove a few bits
> > of PPP overhead, but ignore their costs.  Those costs include CPU cycles,
> > implementation complexity including inevitable interoperability problems
> > and bugs, complications for diagnostic tools such as PPP frame monitors
> > and decoders, and the bandwidth spent negotiating the options (successfully
> > or not).  
>
> True.  Like header compression.

Yes and no; Like some but unllike some other kinds of header compression.
Header compression over very low speed links (less than 32 Kbit/sec) is
very valuable.  However, even VJ header compression is uninteresting to
the people who would pay for it over links fast enough to paint Mpixel
displays or merely fetch any of the bazillions of web pages on the WWW.
If even VJ header compression were valued today, it would be possible to
find an ISP that supports it.  That it is practically impossible to by VJ
header compressed IP bandwidth says all that needs to be said about any
new PPP header compression scheme that removes far fewer than the 37 bytes
per frame of VJ header compression.

> > Both
> > are like WAP and try to optimize bandwidth as if today were 1980, while
> > ignoring other costs and not looking for a plausible 21st Century use.
>
> Nope.  WAP changes entire end systems, warps security architectures,
> requires new boxes in the middle of the network.  Header compression,
> PPPMUX and things like that change consenting routers and, if
> successful, cause localized changes in host stacks.
> Totally different space.

On the contrary, you're mixing technical and non-technical issues.  
Besides the technical foolishness of WAP, WAP assumes characteristics of
networks, users, and end user equipment that seem silly to anyone outside
the old mass media and the telephone industry.  WAP assumes that surfing
the web over postage stamp sized monochrome screens is useful to other
employees of telcos and telco suppliers.  The rest of the world won't care
about "web enabled" wireless (or land line) telephones until they have
mega-pixel (or close) displays.  Those bit displays won't be useful until
they also have the bandwidth required to paint them.  Thus, WAP, like this
proposal, makes economic or marketing sense only if you assume nonsense,
starting with such a dearth of bandwidth to the fancy wireless phones of
the future that no one will buy them or pay for air time.

> PS.: It would help if certain PPP veterans would occasionally read up
> on the technical parameters of VoIP, all-IP fixed networks for
> wireless, etc.  I'm not sure I like PPPMUX too much (even with my
> little change :-), but I can already guess who will be implementing
> it.

It would help even more if there were less mindless advocacy for the last
gasps and brainclouds of the telephants, as well as presumptions that no
one outside the telephone industry ever looks at the latest telco
definitions of IP and the Intenet.  That telephone history, teleco business
models and plans, and telco service guarantees are based on the assumption
and claim that PSTN connections to customers can carry at most 1200 bit/sec
(or in recent years, 14 kbit/sec) of digital data matters less and less
to the rest of the universe.

Yes, I suppose PPPMUX will be implemented by the same outfits that are
trying to reduce their market capitalization enough so that they can be
taken private with capital raised by passing a hat at an IETF meeting,
which is to say  the same outfits pushing WAP.  In 18 months or 2 years,
when it is obvious even to enthusiastic telco and telco supplier
stockholders that the vast sums spent are WAP are completely wasted, what
will happen?

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2000 21:28:34 +0200 (MET DST)

This will be my last message in this thread.

Vernon Schryver writes:
> [lots of stuff that just makes we want to repeat what I said earlier:]

> > wireless, etc.

Hint: "average packet size", "cost of spectrum", "cost of bandwidth in
access networks".

Gruesse, Carsten

PS.:
> mega-pixel (or close) displays.  

Little do you know...
(Hint: "i-mode".)

---

From: Dan Wing <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 16:27:48 -0700 (PDT)

> per frame of VJ header compression.

Quite true for reasonably-sized IP payload sizes.

But header compression remains useful when the payloads are 10 or 20 bytes
such as with voice samples.

-Dan Wing