I am in Maastricht at the 78th IETF meeting.
In the weeks before the meeting many IETF'ers complained about the fact that there were no direct flights to the venue. The closest airports are Amsterdam and Brussels, but from there three trains had to be taken.
At first I had thought that the problem was related to carrying luggage between trains, but discovered that the concerns were more about the differences between connection-oriented and connectionless networking.
Plane flights are similar to MPLS or ATM.
You set up the entire end-to-end route before taking it.
You pay for the desired quality of service (business class / economy) and the appropriate resources are reserved for you.
Your connections should be seamless (e.g., they transfer your luggage for you) but, if a connection fails you have to invoke the management system and wait a long time for a reroute (with gold passengers suffering less delay than non-prioritorized ones).
Train rides are like IP.
You pay a flat rate to get to Maastricht.
There are many valid ways to get there (via Utrecht, via Amsterdam Centraal, or via Rotterdam), and which you take is nondeterministic, depending on when you start the journey and whether some lines are not running (due to weekends, work on the lines, etc).
The processing required at each hop may seem complex (arrive at platform 13, take elevator up, and then down to platform 5a), but your best strategy is just to take the first train in the right direction that comes along (after all Dijkstra was Dutch).
You can pay for a first-class DiffServ priority, but the difference is not very big and they don't reserve an assigned seat for you.
Even if you accidentally get on the wrong cabin and end up in Heerlan, you just take the next train back.
It seems surprising to me that so many IETF78 participants were worried that the IP way of doing things would not work.
Y(J)S
