There have been a number of news stories of late about increasingly popular iPhones purportedly overloading the AT&T Wireless network. On his blog, Brough Turner asks if all the blame may be misdirected. Could the data-congestion woes of AT&T Wireless be caused in part by the network's own configuration errors? — "Specifically, congestion collapse induced by misconfigured buffers in their mobile core network." Snip:
In early September, David Reed sent this interesting message to the IRTF's "end-to-end" email list. List members include some world experts on Internet protocols. During the next couple of days, there were over 40 messages in related threads. While some of these experts were over-thinking the problem, if you are patient enough to read through the many messages, what emerges is clear. At least in the case David measured (from a hotel room in Chicago, while he had 5 bars of signal strength, using an AT&T Mercury 3G data modem in his laptop), the terrible throughput and extreme delays he experienced appear to result from overly large buffers in the routers &/or switches in AT&T's core network. Note: if you don't want to read all the list messages the short summary is: >8 second pings times! What's more the effect was bymodal: either ping times under 200 ms, or over 5 seconds.
Has AT&T Wireless congestion been self-inflicted? [via Rusty]
