Subject: Re: [homegate] Home gateway systems

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 12:27:47 +0200

On 10 Aug 2009, at 9:15 , [email-masked] wrote:

> HomeGate is _not_ only about congestion management and queueing,

Why not? If you do everything right but do this part wrong, you still  
have a miserable user experience that is almost impossible to fix  
elsewhere.

> Where it is relevant is
> in making sure that the relatively smart router doesn't throw  
> packets out
> of its WAN port faster than the dumb modem can handle.

And how exactly is device A supposed to know how fast device B can  
transmit packets over the broadband link? Since ADSL and cable aren't  
ethernet, there is no 1-to-1 relationship between the size of ethernet  
packets that A sees and the size and therefore supported rate for the  
non-ethernet packets that B transmits. On cable it's worse it's a  
shared medium with ever changing uplink capacity.

Maybe it makes sense for A to send packets to B at something like 150%  
of B's uplink capacity rather than the default 100 Mbps if A has more  
advanced queuing than B as a step in the right direction, but it's  
never going to be as good as sitting right on top of the actual uplink  
and doing the smart queuing there, unless you're ok with staying well  
below the real uplink capacity, which is a terrible way to handle this  
with today's uplink-starved broadband.

About the charter(-like) discussion: someone suggested IPv4, IPv6 and  
DNS. Why IPv4? Don't we know how to do that by now?