On 19/08/2011 04:41 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/19/2011 8:16, Invisible wrote:
>> OK. So exchange to exchange links and stuff?
>
> That, carrying text messages sometimes, control backplane, DOCSIS, DSL,
> etc etc etc.

> I.e., ATM is used over fiber (usually in turn over SONET) wherever in
> *your* house you are using ethernet.

OK. Is that for legacy reasons, or because ATM is actually good at 
something?

> Honestly, IP is a pretty sucky and limited technology, except for its
> flexibility.

Pffaaahahaha!

"Yeah, IP really sucks, except for being really flexible." Yes, because 
flexibility is a really sucky thing to have.

> It's both inefficient in transmission and extremely
> difficult to manage well.

In what way?

> You couldn't possibly use it internal to the
> phone company for routing or addressing. (For example, one area code
> (aka "city code") in the USA supports more phone numbers than all of
> IPv4.)

Um, excuse me?

The entire population of Kansas is only 2 million people. The IP address 
space is 4 *thousand* million unique addresses. So unless each person 
has a thousand telephone numbers, you don't have a problem.

> But it's everywhere, for the same reason that C is everywhere:
> It's so limited you can layer it on top of pretty much any underlying
> transport.

I still don't see the problem. Then again, IP is the only thing I've 
seen that can handle more than 100 nodes at once...

> For example, one of my colleagues was making fun of ISO's CMIP for being
> connection-oriented, because having trouble getting a connection is one
> of the most common reasons you'd use SNMP. I said "they just dedicate a
> physical connection to it. The smallest bundle going into any switch has
> 900 physical pairs, and usually closer to hundreds of thousands." At
> this point, the student was enlightened.

I'm not though.

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