At 10:18 AM 26-03-02 -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote: > You mean Exodus are well connected and C&W limit themselves which gives > longer paths and increased latency.
Longer paths definitely, increased jitter probably, increased latency probably, increased loss possibly.
In general, as companies and backbones merge and eliminate "old" ASNs, that would reduce the overall AS path length. That in general should not affect latency but as tier-1 ASNs grow in size, and control more of the path end to end, the latency should improve. The majors/tier1s like AT&T, UUnet, Genuity and C&W provide SLAs "end-to-end" *within* their ASN. They control the pipes, they know what they can take and they don't have to worry about some overloaded peering link. So as consolidation takes place, we should see better latencies and better SLAs. -Hank
C&W obviously have to have a lot of peering as well, since it's all they have to sell to their customers. However, their peering tends to be limited to a small number of peers to whom they have large connections, whereas Exodus had a large number of peers to whom they had medium-sized connections. So the average hop-count and as-path length for the Internet as a whole are both increased by this action, and nearly all paths increase in length for Exodus customers. So yes, Exodus customers are the big losers in the wake of this.
-Bill