Comment by silvestrov
7 hours ago
> not actually needed
What you need is more that enough bandwidth.
Think of the difference between a highway with few cars versus a highway filled to the brim with cars. In the latter case traffic slows to a crawl even for ambulances.
It seems like it was just cheaper and easier to build more bandwidth than it was to add traffic priority handling to internet connectivity.
And that cheaper bit I think just came from reduced complexity. With things like ATM circuits and other similar highly reliable and predictable methods, they needed a lot of hand holding. You needed to provision an ATM circuit, you needed to make sure across the network that the path was there, capable, maintained, and configured, and you had visibility end to end
That was a selling point, because "hey we guarantee this circuit" but it was also very expensive and labor intensive
Where just dumping your bits into the internet and letting the network figure it out outsourced a lot of that complexity to every hop along the network you didn't own. But, because they care about their networks everyone would (in theory) make sure each hop was healthy, so you didn't need to hand hold your circuit or route completely end to end