[ On Monday, June 17, 2002 at 14:56:36 (-0700), Mansey, Jon wrote: ]
Subject: RE: remember the "diameter of the internet"?
I think this is pretty simple. Its just that the closest city to you where ATT and XO peer is Chicago. If they peered in Dallas, it would a whole lot better.
....and maybe if they peered in LA then XO's conjested link between Dallas and LA might be avoided..... :-)
I get this all the time, not as bad as this, going to sites across town (LA) when a trace regularly goes via San Jose and back.
I guess the Internet isnt as inter-networked as it could be, and less and less so seemingly.
You should try looking at things from some less connected country! ;-) Even from up here in Toronto things can look decidedly silly at times. The worst was recently when most of my packets came and went via Chicago, then Vancouver, and then back to New York, or some such ludicrous route. At least in that case it wasn't too hard to convince someone that something was wrong (since the packets in that case traversed that person's cross-country links only to bounce off the router at the far end and come all the way back over the same circuit). Now my packets only go to Chicago and back in order to make the round trip across the downtown core.
The old idea of mutual peering being good for the net etc seems firmly dead nowadays.
"I'm a Tier-One transit provider -- I only sell transit! You need to be just like me in order to peer with me, and you need to exchange gigabits of traffic with me in every exchange I'm connected into. Good luck meeting my requirements! Meanwhile would you like to pay port and access charges to reach my other customers instead?", and then there's the "we don't peer with customers" tactic -- as if they have _only_ other transit networks as customers, though oddly ARIN often disagrees with their view of things.... -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098; <gwoods@acm.org>; <g.a.woods@ieee.org>; <woods@robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>