Because of the capture effect, streams do not interleave well thereby making it hard to share bandwidth. The end result is users who perceive the network to be slow. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the average workstation in 1990 was not terribly fast. When connected to a network, one workstation alone could not consume the entire network's bandwidth by itself. From this information, we can derive that interpacket-arrival times will only become shorter.
Faster hosts mean more network congestion.
Given the changing nature of network traffic along with the faster hosts to generate it, we are seeing an increase in network utilization which is forcing us to think about how bandwidth gets allocated. Many individuals are proposing bandwidth controls at either network cores through the use of ATM or at WAN gateways where bandwidth is considered most precious. But knowing that the workstations that require the greatest amount of bandwidth are at the network's edges leads us to try and exercise control at the host level as well.