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I went so you don't have to -- ICANN Bruxelles pour les nuls
by Eric Brunner-Williams 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

There are a few people who have some passing interest in ICANN so I will inflict upon the list my few paragraph summary of things that matter. All the past large dragons appear to have been killed or reduced to largish lizards. The Four Over Arching Issues, of which only one was real, protection of trademark holders, are sufficiently solved. On the other hand, biting off fingers as usual, are two new shiny objects for the jays and daws to chase: vertical integration of registries and registrars (VI, like, you know, the visual mode of ex, not the evil EMACS cult) and morality and decency (MoDo). How big a thrill MoDo is going to be is still TBD. Content regulation via names. Whoopie! VI is going to be put to bed one way or another by Labor Day. About VI, which has consumed my every waking hour since ... the Nairobi meeting. Prior to Nairobi the rules reflected the NetSol/VGRS breakup, and allowed registries to own approximately 15% of a registrar, and registrars to own registries. Afilias (.info) and NeuLevel (.biz) were formed under these equity restrictions. At Nairobi the Board voted that there be no cross ownership in new gTLD registries, and just prior to the Brussels meeting last week, ICANN released the 4th version of the Draft Applicant Guide, which put the cross-ownership limit at 2%. The VI activity is an attempt to articulate an alternate to the 0%, now 2%, and still fluid rule the Board may adopt prior to starting the next application round. The broad choices (and venomous camps) are: 1. things pretty much stay the same, the 15% rule with some change continues, for .com-like and .coop-like registries, insiders rule, 2. things pretty much change, with 100% cross-ownership allowed, with various proposals for the prevention of abuse by the integrated entity, for .com-like and .coop-like registries, hurray for the revolution, and 3. who cares about 1 and 2? corporations and TLD consultants want lots (like hundreds) of brands in the root, now. The VI Working Group is about as fun as USENET, though the face-to-face meetings in Brussels were surprisingly civil. Of interest to some here is covert wiggling of a subscriber-type TLD through the semi-mythical loophole for "brand" TLDs. There are walled garden serpents working the issue towards ".my-walled-garden". The ISPSG (that's the ISP -- Internet.Service.Providers Stakeholders Group) continued to drift into senility and decay with ISPs still staffing ICANN issue advocacy out of their IP (Intellectual Property) in-house counsels rather than their IP (4&6&BGP&tone&stuff) operational sides, so wakeful behavior remains confined to the ASO input to ICANN, and limited to the last v4 /8s known to LGBT and other persons. Those are the big ticket items. The Board approved adding the Han Script labels requested by .cn (China), .tw (Taiwan) and .hk (Hong Kong), which made a lot of people, me included, feel good. This is the continuation of the approvals (and awkward delegations) of Arabic Script labels and Cyrillic Script labels made earlier. The security weenies continue to whine that all the new registries should be armored up to prevent abuses that overwhelmingly occur in .com, and surprise steer well clear of treading on Verisign's toes, so in vast areas of policy life in the playpen is quite surreal. The next meeting is in December, so I finally get a Halloween at home, in Cartagena, Columbia. The usual self-and-corporate-promotion-as-news is going on over CircleID, which everyone is free to read or avoid, and if you read today's CIDR and BGP reports with more than a passing interest, and this "pour les nuls", remember the first is reality based and the second is not. And no, there still is no firm date for ICANN to start the public announcement and four months later, start accepting applications and $185,000 checks. This sentence appears to age well, I've used it without sending it out for cleaning since the Paris meeting, six meetings in a row. This exchange: > On 2 Jul 2010, at 13:34, Bret Clark wrote: > >> 28.8k Modem users... > > AT&T iPhone users... the new 14.4 modem of the internet. Had me laughing! Have a nice weekend everyone! Eric

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LACNOC 2010 - Meeting Registration
by LACNOG 2010 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Dear colleagues, LACNOG is pleased to announce the opening of registration to participate in the LACNOG 2010 meeting to be held in conjunction with LACNIC XIV and the 4th Brazilian PTT Forum. This joint event will take place from 19 to 22 October 2010, at the Caesar Park International Airport Hotel in Guarulhos, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Register now at: http://www.lacnog.org/en/eventos/lacnog-2010/registro Book your hotel at: http://www.lacnog.org/en/eventos/lacnog-2010/hospedaje Information and other details are available at the meeting website: http://www.lacnog.org/en/eventos/lacnog-2010/inicio LACNOG Program Committee

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off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth myths
by Andrew Odlyzko 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Since several members of this list requested it, here is a summary of the responses to my request for information about Internet growth during the telecom bubble, in particular the perceptions of the O'Dell/Sidgmore/WorldCom/UUNet "Internet doubling every 100 days" myth. First of all, many thanks to all those who responded, on and off-list. This involved extensive correspondence and some long phone conversations, and helped fill out the picture of those very confusing times (and also made it even clearer than before that there were many different perspectives on what was happening). The entire message is rather long, but it is written in sections, to make it easy to get the gist quickly and neglect the rest. Andrew ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Short summary: People who got into the game late, or had been working at small ISPs or other enterprises, were generally willing to give serious credence to the "Internet doubling every 100 days" tale. The old-timers, especially those who worked for large ISPs or other large corporate establishment or research networks, were convinced by the late 1990s that this tale was false, but did not talk about it publicly, even inside the NANOG community. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Longer version: The range of views was very wide, and hard to give justice to in full. But there seemed to be two distinct groups, and the consensus views (which obviously exclude quite a few people) appear to have been: 2A: Those who entered the field in the late 1990s, especially if they worked for small ISPs or other small enterprises, tended to regard the claim seriously. (But it should be remarked that hardly anybody devoted too much effort or thought to the claim, they were too busy putting out fires in their own backyards to worry about global issues.) They remembered periods of desperate efforts to keep up with exploding demand in their businesses. We saw just a few hours ago a post about LINX growing 5.5x in one year. Somebody else wrote about growing their business's traffic 1,000x in 2 years, or about 30x per year. People involved in such incidents often tended to think that their experience during such times might not have been untypical. 2B: Those who worked at places with large traffic, and especially those who got into the field in the early 1990s, were quite sure by the late 1990s that the UUNet fable was just that. Comments regarding everything emanating from UUNet during that period included phrases like "blowing smoke," "rolling our eyes," "taking it with a rock of salt." They had no direct knowledge of what went on inside UUNet, but from watching peering traffic, talking to salespeople about customer losses and wins, and to suppliers about deliveries of equipment, they could be pretty certain that neither the traffic nor the capacity of UUNet could be exploding at the mythical rates. They could see occasional spikes in traffic growth at some customers, or in some parts of their networks, but overall could see traffic growth settling down to a fairly regular doubling or a bit more than doubling each year. However, they did not discuss this in public, and I discuss that below, in point #4. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Growth spurt in mid-1990s: The old-timers also provided very informative feedback about the global Internet traffic growth spurt in the 1995-96 time frame. It did hit suddenly and unexpectedly. (I am still trying to get confirmation on this, but I believe one of the informants said that before this period, the engineers at that person's Tier-1 ISP would routinely double the forecasts provided by the marketing team. At the peak of the bubble, the marketers would demand that the engineers plan for double the capacity that the engineers thought was going to be necessary.) Moreover, the dramatic slowdown in traffic growth that took place in 1997 was, at least in a number of cases, due substantially to a capacity crunch. Router and photonic equipment manufacturers did not have the technology needed for the traffic, and ILECs were slow in supplying access as well as backbone links. Hence the traffic growth spurt in 1996-96 was followed by a capacity growth spurt in 1997-98, which helped provide more credibility for the myth. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Information viscosity: This incident provides far more information confirming the concept of "information viscosity" that I wrote about in my paper, that important and relevant information was available, but was not widely dispersed. Why did the information that Internet traffic was not doubling every 100 days get out to the public? It was not a closely guarded national security secret, after all. There seemed to be many reasons operating. In the case of Genuity (as the quote from Scott Marcus in my paper explains) it was a high-level decision, that going public would hurt the company, as it might be suspected of losing market share. But that seemed to be unusual, in that Genuity, while a major Tier-1 ISP, was small and independent, and so had people like Scott who were engineers, yet involved in policy making. At other places, other dynamics operated. At AT&T, for example, I was called in to a meeting with the management of WorldNet, the AT&T ISP unit, at the end of 2000. They had been telling their customers that Internet traffic was growing 10x per year, and some of those customers asked them about the discrepancy between that claim and the estimates of some folks from AT&T Labs - Research (Kerry Coffman and myself) that growth was just 2x per year. Now it is an interesting perspective on "information viscosity" and AT&T (and other large bureaucratic organizations) that those folks had not heard of Kerry's and my work, even though we had publicized it at the company. But in any event, at that meeting, I did succeed in convincing them that Internet traffic was growing only 2x per year (using evidence in my papers with Kerry, as well as extensive additional data from within AT&T itself), and they agreed they would not propagate the myth among customers. But the interesting thing was that many of the attendees (who included quite a few engineering types, not just the management) seemed disappointed. That really surprised me. After all, AT&T's Internet traffic was growing just about 4x per year, which meant our market share was doubling, instead of being cut in half. But it seems that many of them had really bought into the Internet dream. And, furthermore, the story that we were losing market share was a good one to pry additional resources from the corporation. Several of the NANOG old-timers said that they felt constrained from speaking about the falsity of the myth of astronomical growth rates by group solidarity. After all, it was a small, select group, and bad-mouthing one of their own in front of outsiders or even NANOG newbies did not seem the right thing to do. Then there was the additional factor that one person discussed very explicitly, and that I infer also applied in other cases. The myth was useful. Back in the mid-1990s, when it was not a myth, it did spur equipment suppliers and ILECs to greater effort. And afterwards, it was handy in internal fights over power and resources. If the Internet was exploding, one should not worry about closely examining expansion plans. In some ways, the persistence of false perceptions about Internet traffic growth mirrors that of utilization rates of data networks. When I wrote the paper "Data networks are lightly utilized, and will stay that way," back in 1998, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/network.utilization.pdf the more clueful data network engineers all knew that utilization rates were generally low, and usually had a good understanding as to why. But top management, as well as the research community, were almost uniformly convinced that congestion was the rule. It took me a while to understand the dynamics of the situation, in which network engineers and managers found it easier to say that they were experiencing 80% utilization and 20% packet losses and needed to upgrade, without having to explain to CEOs, CIOs, and especially to clueless CFOs, that this referred just to the peak hour on one crucial corporate WAN link, and yet justified a big new investment. Few people were lying, but many had incentives to maintain delusions among the top levels of the hierarchy. These demonstrations of information viscosity of course undermine the foundations of much of modern economics, especially of the efficient markets hypothesis. But that last myth is even more durable than "Internet traffic doubling every 100 days," especially since it does not lead directly to lots of dark fiber lying around unused, and lots of companies bankrupt. Information viscosity in facts and ideas in economics is very high, so we should not expect any changes on that scene. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. As a reminder, the paper that led to this discussion is "Bubbles, gullibility, and other challenges for economics, psychology, sociology, and information sciences," http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/mania03.pdf The page with source materials from the bubbles times, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/isources/ now has, in addition to a transcript of the O'Dell lecture at Stanford in May 2000, a copy of the Sidgmore paper from the Vortex98 Conference of May 1998.

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Google wants your Internet to be faster
by Mark Boolootian 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

Cringely has a theory and it involves Google and Verizon, but it doesn't involve net neutrality: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/opinion/08cringeley.html?_r=2

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Recommended 1Gb SFP for ~115km?
by Abello, Vinny 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

Hello, Any pointers on real world experience on this topic would greatly be appreciated. What are people using successfully out there as far as third party SFP's go to hit a distance of approximately 115km? This would be for a Catalyst 6506. Cisco's solution was a much more costly EDFA solution, but I see plenty of vendors that make SFP's for Gigabit Ethernet that range from 115km to 150km and more. I know these are not supported by Cisco and TAC won't troubleshoot if they are in the switch. I'm willing to work around that should I need TAC assistance on the switch. What works well for a single wavelength solution at this distance without having to switch to DWDM? This circuit will have duplex fibers. Thanks! -Vinny

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Send NANOG mailing list submissions
by KANDE Baya 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

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Example RFI for colo provider selection
by Jason Lixfeld 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

I'm researching a list of some colocation providers I have here to find the most suitable one to provide services for a project I'm working on. My thought is to send out an informal RFI, which I believe is something others may have done too. If anyone is able to share, I'd be interested in having a peek at some of these colo-centric RFIs to understand what questions others have asked in the past, as it may help me come up with some questions that I may not have thought of myself. If an RFI isn't an appropriate means to gather information on such a prospect, I'd certainly like to hear that too. Thanks in advance. PS. To any reader who may be thinking this is an open invitation for a sales email, it's not :)

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Re: off-topic: historical query concerning the Internet bubble
by Frank A. Coluccio 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

re: Capacity ".... as measured by OC12-miles, doubles every four months..." Now that's a fascinating form of metric in itself. Distance * bit-rate equals capacity? What happened to the 'traffic' component? Likewise, what does this say regarding the various thresholds for refreshing bandwidth that individual operators have set as defaults, i.e., 20%, or 50%, or even 90%, before pulling the trigger and lighting up the next OC 'n'? Some providers tweaked 'n tuned their networks until the cows came home, others threw bandwidth 'lavishly' at the first inkling of the next plateau being reached. Even full disclosure by all Tier Ones concerning the number of OC-12 ports they were using, under these conditions, couldn't give an accurate picture of actual traffic levels being supported, IMO. --- odlyzko(a)umn.edu wrote: From: odlyzko(a)umn.edu (Andrew Odlyzko) To: randy(a)psg.com Cc: nanog(a)nanog.org Subject: Re: off-topic: historical query concerning the Internet bubble Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:30:44 -0500 Fascinating. Memories may be plastic (something that has been established scientifically), or else we may have yet another inconsistency to add to the pile of others. Is there any documentation about the "doubling every nine months"? I have never seen that particular claim emanating from anyone involved with WorldCom/UUNet. On the other hand, existing record shows (among others): 1. U.S. Department of Commerce white paper from April 1998, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ecommerce/EDEreprt.pdf on p. 8 declares that "UUNET, one of the largest Internet backbone providers, estimates that Internet traffic doubles every 100 days," with a reference to an Inktomi white paper that attributes this claim to Mike O'Dell. The Inktomi report is no longer on the Web, but I can provide a copy to anyone interested. 2. The transcript of the May 2000 presentation by O'Dell at a Stanford conference clearly has him saying that the capacity of the UUNet network, as measured by OC12-miles, doubles every four months, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/isources/odell-transcript.txt As is explained in my paper, in the 1998-2000 time frame, essentially all the WorldCom/UUNet claims then seemed to be about capacity, not traffic. 3. The year-end 2000 email from O'Dell to Dave Farber's IP list, http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200011/ms g00058.html has him talking of traffic doubling each year, while capacity grows 8-fold. If some time in that period there was a claim of a "doubling every nine months," too, that would be very interesting. Andrew Randy Bush <randy(a)psg.com> wrote: > >> my memory is that he said doubling every nine months. > > Mine too. > > mo's too. i asked. > > randy

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Proxy Server
by Joshua William Klubi 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

Hi, Is there any one with an idea of an open source packeteer or bandwidth management solution like Allot NetEnforcer Bandwidth Management Appliance. Which can do proxy services and also allocate bandwidth to certain websites and staff, prevent them from viewing certain websites We currently have Microsoft TMG 2010 with GFI Web monitor 2009 installed on it, we are looking for a solution possible from open source.Which can replace it. I actually want it as a proxy server and use it to shape, allocate and restrict access to certain websites of our staff. Joshua (Ghana)

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Looking for a Illinois Century Network(AS6325) contact
by courtneysmith＠comcast.net 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

Looking for a network engineering contact at ICN(AS6325). I'm trying to find out if they have BGP communities for their customers to use. Please reply off list. Thanks.

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