Re: [conex] An interesting video

Hi,

The video is alright, but the analogy is a bit limited, in my view.

Car traffic jams are mostly cases of pathological congestion, i.e., congestion makes the systems (close to) unusable. In the Internet, we have transport protocols to prevent this.

What transport protocols today do not enable without network infrastructure support is capacity sharing that ensures good performance for different application types and users in the presence of full network utilization. For example, keeping latency low for my short-lived AJAX interaction although it has to share bottlenecks with other users's bulk data transfers.

In a street network, you want the trucks to yield for the much faster ambulance, so that the ambulance passengers get acceptable quality of experience and so that the truck drivers can still use all lanes under normal conditions. (I am bad at analogies. ;-)

A complete metering and charging infrastructure is indeed non-trivial and expensive to operate.  ConEx is essentially intended as not too complex (i.e., cost-efficient) network infrastructure support to incentivize such sharing. And that does not imply a general toll collect for all traffic as in the video.

Best regards,
Dirk

> -----Original Message-----
> From: conex-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:conex-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf
> Of Mikael Abrahamsson
> Sent: Mittwoch, 19. Dezember 2012 18:04
> To: Matt Mathis
> Cc: ConEx IETF list
> Subject: Re: [conex] An interesting video
> 
> On Wed, 19 Dec 2012, Matt Mathis wrote:
> 
> > An interesting video, relevant to this group:  "Jonas Eliasson: How to
> > solve traffic jams" http://youtu.be/CX_Krxq5eUI [TED Talks]
> 
> I have some input. The system he's talking about (Stockholm congestion
> charging system) costs around 100MUSD per year to operate. How much
> roads could we get for the same amount of money, and would that be a
> better investment? The answer seems to have been "no". (I live in
> Stockholm, I'm one of the people he's referring to who disliked the system
> initially and who now likes it).
> 
> So let's take the analogy to this group. How much would it cost to bring in an
> infrastructure to create the incentives to make people adapt to move some
> of their traffic to another part of the day, or not run the traffic at all (which is
> what a traffic congestion system tries to achieve).
> 
> I don't believe I have seen a system that actually reduces cost by trying to
> intelligently manage congestion or moving traffic spatially, compared to the
> cost of building out the network. A lot of the success of the Internet has
> been flat-rate billing so one basically doesn't have to have a lot of system and
> staff to handle usage-based billing. I don't really see how a congestion
> management system would fare any better. It adds complexity to the
> Network and I don't see how it would really help.
> Basically I don't see the incentives for the user to change.
> 
> But I'd gladly be proven wrong, that's why I follow this mailing list.
> 
> --
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se
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