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- **********************************************************************
- DDN MGT Bulletin 39 DCA DDN Defense Communications System
- 28 Mar 88 Published by: DDN Network Info Center
- (NIC@SRI-NIC.ARPA) (800) 235-3155
-
-
- DEFENSE DATA NETWORK
-
- MANAGEMENT BULLETIN
-
-
- The DEFENSE DATA NETWORK MANAGEMENT BULLETIN is distributed online by
- the DDN Network Information Center under DCA contract as a means of
- communicating official ARPANET policy, procedures and other
- information of concern to management personnel at ARPANET facilities.
- Back issues may be read through the TACNEWS server ("@n" command at
- the TAC) or may be obtained by FTP (or Kermit) from the SRI-NIC host
- [26.0.0.73 or 10.0.0.51] using login="anonymous" and password="guest".
- The pathname for bulletins is DDN-NEWS:DDN-MGT-BULLETIN-nn.TXT (where
- "nn" is the bulletin number).
-
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- DARPA ARPANET POLICY AND MGT BULLETIN - No. 2
- ---------------------------------------------
-
- DEATH OF THE ARPANET AND OTHER PARANOIA
-
- There have been a number of rumors throughout the community that the
- ARPANET project is being terminated. Many individuals and
- organizations have expressed concern that the service that they have
- become accustomed to will be terminated.
-
- Enough rumors, now a word from your sponsor, DARPA.
-
- The ARPANET project in fact is being terminated, but not soon. DARPA
- is in the business of conducting research into critical NEW
- technologies that will advance the state of the art. ARPANET is
- neither new, nor state of the art. It is slow and expensive.
-
- ARPANET was founded in the early 70's when 56Kbit/second trunks were
- on the cutting edge of modulation and transmission technology. Packet
- switching was unheard of. (An interesting fact is that the average
- terminal of the day was 30cps giving the net trunks about a factor of
- 230 faster than the average user interface). Since that time the
- project expanded into the INTERNET where a number of dissimilar
- networks could be interconnected relatively transparently. The
- internet grew from about 63 hosts to over 20,000. The local nets that
- connect to the ARPANET and other Wide Area Nets (WANs) progressively
- increased in speed. The result is that while in '73 a large number of
- users could effectively share one trunk, today, one PC can provide as
- much traffic as a host.
-
- In addition to being heavily loaded, the ARPANET is no longer able to
- support its other prime function, that of a research base. To conduct
- any kind of experiment on the ARPANET causes too much service
- disruption to the community.
-
- Finally, the ARPANET is absorbing a significant fraction of our total
- research budget in what is really a support function.
-
- Solution, eliminate the source of the problem. Rather than cutting
- off the community our approach is to outgrow the ARPANET in a few
- years.
-
- The follow-on network experiment will be called the Defense Research
- Internet (DRI). We are also working in conjunction with other Federal
- agencies, most notably National Science Foundation, to integrate our
- networking experiments with the new regional networks, the NSFNET
- project, and other agency networks.
-
- An additional source of confusion is the fact that we are currently
- arranging for NSFNET to support some ARPANET users, as part of a joint
- effort to reduce costs by phasing out overlapping service. Our
- intention, as always, is to do this with minimal disruption to the
- research community.
-
- While this is happening, we will be putting together the initial
- version of the DRI apart from the ARPANET. From the beginning the DRI
- will provide the long distance trunk capacity that the ARPANET lacks.
- Initial speeds will be 1.5Mbit/second per link (a factor of 25
- improvement). The DRI will also be segregated into an "experimental"
- and an "operational" side. The experimental side will have higher
- performance, with the possibility of higher degree of net problems;
- the operational side will support high data-rate applications such as
- image transfer. The experimental side will be phased from 1.5Mbit to
- higher and higher bandwidths with the intent of eventually reaching
- gigabit/second performance; the operational side will take over for
- the ARPANET. It will be operated by a contractor, and will be funded
- as overhead on individual users' projects rather than becoming a drain
- on the Networking research budget. After the DRI is stable, the
- ARPANET will be phased out.
-
-
- PLEASE DON'T BURY US WITH QUERIES ON THE DETAILS OF THE
- IMPLEMENTATION, WE DON'T HAVE TIME TO ANSWER THEM. AS DETAILS ARE
- FINALIZED AND READY FOR PUBLIC DISSEMINATION, WE WILL POST THEM.
-
-
- Mark Pullen & Brian Boesch
- Information Sciences Technology Office
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
-
-