Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cica!iuvax!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!quick!happym!nwnexus!edm
From: edm@nwnexus.WA.COM (Ed Morin)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: to PEP or not to PEP?
Message-ID: <160@nwnexus.WA.COM>
Date: 11 Aug 89 17:38:17 GMT
References: <1989Aug10.175458.20369@utzoo.uucp> <221@van-bc.UUCP>
Organization: Northwest Nexus Inc.; Seattle, WA
Lines: 44


In the same vein, here is another situation which gives pause to consider
whether to PEP or not.  I'll try to be concise by using a somewhat contrived
example involving the machine "homesite":

1.  homesite has all TrailBlazer dialins and dialouts.

2.  homesite has crummy multiplexers (not uncommon) and gets about 12kb
    sending and 8kb receiving performance for one line with *no other
    activity*.

3.  When other lines are active (possibly in PEP), the performance
    degrades significantly.  In fact, over a 3 week period it tends to
    average about 4kb for received data (faster for sent data)!

4.  Now, since homesite connects to UUNET, and homesite's pocketbook is
    not infinite, there is incentive to optimize the connection.  Roughly
    speaking, if you say that a 2400 baud connection averages around 2kb
    (which it seems to for a small sample) then any 2400 baud solution
    needs to be multiplied by 2 to make it somewhat equivalent to a PEP
    connection.  Here is a brief comparison of per hour rates normalized
    to a 4kb transfer rate:

			Day	Evening	Night
	UUNET 800	16	13	10
	CompuServe	10	10	10

    As you can see, CompuServe is cheaper, even at a slower baud rate,
    than the UUNET 800 dialin during the day and evening!  But that's
    only because the multiplexers aren't taking full advantage of the
    TrailBlazer speeds!  And there are even cheaper possibilities than
    this with slow speed connections...

So, my question is, has anybody else done this exercise in more detail.
I have more notes, but didn't post them in order to keep things simple.
My reaction to all this was "No wonder there are people in the world
who do nothing but manage datacommunications connections."  Sigh.


-- 
Ed Morin
Northwest Nexus Inc.
"Unix Public Access for the Masses!"
edm@nwnexus.WA.COM