The last issue of IEEE Spectrum contains a cover story written by Larry Roberts, one of the creators of the ARPANET. The cover's title claims that the Internet is broken.. This is not the first time that someone claims that the Internet is broken. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet had similar claims a few years ago.

However, Larry Roberts' article is not a pessimitic view of the Internet. He basically tries to convince the reader that the edge routers designed by his current company are the solution to improve the Internet. Unfortunately, there are not enough details about how these routers work to understand completely the proposed solution. Larry Robert's web site contains pointers to technical reports, but unfortunately they look more like marketing reports than technical reports. They do not provide any detail about how their new routers operate and start by very strange assumptions. For example, the second page contains the following formula about the performance of TCP :

TCP Rate (Mbps) = 376 / (1+Loss / 0.5%) / (RTT + 4)
Where RTT=Round Trip Delay in ms and Loss is the packet loss %.

This looks very strange to researchers who know Padhye's formula ftp://gaia.cs.umass.edu/pub/Padhye-Firoiu98-TCP-throughput.ps

If the anagram routers built by Larry Roberts' new company contain something really innovative, they should provide a much more detailed technical description.