Can the network cope?

[mdubash]

I'm interested in how many people believe that the Internet is a suitable vehicle for converged services -- everything over IP -- given its non-deterministic nature, and what, if anything, can be done to ameliorate its worst characteristics and make it suitable for business use.

[ua549]

In its present form the public Internet is not suitable for ad hoc communications that requires high bandwidth, cost efficiency, quality, reliability or security. Those necessary network attributes are the reason Internet2 was implemented. In a way those are the same issues that led to the initial development of what is now the public Internet that replaced slower, less efficient and less reliable methods of communicating.

[mdubash]

That's fair enough - but assuming you have transit the mainstream public network, I'm thinking about WAN optimization as a technique for mitigating some at least of its bandwidth and latency issues.

[mdubash]

Further on this, there's an interesting article on the Institution of Engineering and Technology's website here (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/201...-computing.cfm) about how the network needs to respond to the extra load placed on it by the growth of cloud computing.