I was going to avoid this thread because I've never been a huge fan of Flowspec for my own reasons. However having work on /been responsible for several "Tier 1 and 2" networks and DDoS mitigation services over the last 20 years, I can say I, nor any of my peers ( in any sense of that word) that I have known, have wanted to keep "bad " traffic on our networks so we can bill for it. Designing and running a large network is hard enough with planed growth, without having to manage unplanned spikes on links that can be orders of magnitude larger then traffic that "normally" flows across it. On top of that any given DDoS attack seldom last long enough to materially impact 95%ile billing, so carriers don't make anything from it, but have to do all the work of moving it around. -jim On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 6:38 PM, Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@arbor.net> wrote:
On 2 May 2016, at 20:16, Martin Bacher wrote:
However, Tier 1s and most probably also some of the Tier 2s may not want
to offer it to customers because they are loosing money if less traffic is sent downstream on IP-Transit links.
I will go a step further than Danny's comments and state that this is categorically and demonstrably untrue.
Many of the quite large 'Tier-1' and 'Tier-2' (using the old terminology) operators on this list offer commercial DDoS mitigation services making use of technologies like D/RTBH, S/RTBH, IDMS, et. al. due to customer demand. They need these capabilities in order to defend their own properties and assets, and they are also offering them to end-customers who want and need them.
In point of fact, it's becoming difficult to find one which *doesn't* offer this type of service.
There were a couple of situations in the first half of the first decade of this millennium where operators took this attitude. But they changed their tunes pretty rapidly once they themselves were impacted, and once they started losing customers because they couldn't and wouldn't protect them.
And as Danny notes, these technologies are all tools in the toolbox. NFV and 'SDN' have tremendous potential to make it a lot easier to bring mitigation resources to bear in a dynamic and optimal fashion within single spans of administrative control; and there are standards-based efforts underway to provide for a higher degree of automation, increased rapidity of response, and interoperability in both inter- and intra-network DDoS mitigation scenarios.
----------------------------------- Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@arbor.net>