On Friday, 15 August 2003, at 11:55AM, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging failure modes.
And if we extrapolate that lesson to IP networks it implies that any medium to large sized organization should do their own BGP peering and multihome to 3 or more upstream network providers.
I don't think that extrapolation is entirely reasonable. The purpose of the Internet is to provide global connectivity; the purpose of a power generation and distribution network is to provide access to power, regardless of where it was generated.
On the other hand, if you understand why electrical networks shed load and develop their cascading failures, you might see some parallels between "load" and the propagation of BGP announcements which are worrying.
A mismatch between content providers and consumers seems like a natural challenge for an Internet of distributed content. It's not obvious to me that you need to engineer around that problem in the power network to the same extent. I wonder how much of the understanding and "100 years experience" of building power distribution networks is based on the fact that affordable, distributed, small-scale power generation is not possible, mandating large-scale, centralised generation and correspondingly complicated transmission. Perhaps the power generation problem needs the attention of a fresh set of eyes. Joe