4 ms·
An interesting fact that we teach in 6.033 is that of the Boston<->San Francisco packet round trip time, half of that time is spent by light propagating through
by akd 18y ago
An interesting fact that we teach in 6.033 is that of the Boston<->San Francisco packet round trip time, half of that time is spent by light propagating through fiber, and half of it is spent in routers.
Cisco makes some amazing products.
- ajross 18y agoI can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Cisco routers, at least at the level I've been exposed to, don't have particularly good switching times. In point of fact, switching an IP header through a few-hundred-thousand-entry routing table is something that any desktop CPU can do in a microsecond or so. Companies like Cisco have managed to convince a lot of people that routers are these hugely complicated devices. They aren't. The hardware side of long haul fiber networking is where the voodoo is. Routing? Not so much.
- akd 18y agoSorry, I don't know much about the innards of routing hardware. I do know that doing all the routing in a time equal to the propagation delay of the light is pretty damn impressive to me.
- whacked_new 18y ago"6.033 = Computer Systems Engineering." There are non-MIT folks here.