Why the internet only just works (2006)
As one of the early workers on network congestion, much of what he says is right.  We really have no idea how to deal with congestion in the middle of the network. The best we can do is have more bandwidth in the middle than at the edges.  Fortunately, the fiber optic and hardware router people have done so well at providing bandwidth that the backbone has mostly been able to keep ahead of the edges.<p>We never dreamed of a connection with over 10,000 packets in flight. Cutting the congestion window in half on a packet loss and ramping it back up one packet at a time was something I came up with around 1984.  That does need to be rethought, and it has been.