Re: Peering Policies and Route Servers
At 10:49 AM 4/30/96 -0400, you wrote:
Unrestricted peering policy would accelerate rolling of the snowball, and lead to the collapse of an interconnect. In order for Internet to survive, this snowball effect got to stop.
... or the hardware has to be manufactured to support it. /Some day/ there are going to be 500 companies at the interconnects, and they are /all/ going to be important players, or that is at least a likely scenario. Will this be next year? No. Unrestricted peering policies are gone, the internet is not what it once was. "There was a day when anyone could peer with anyone..." Yeah, there was also a day when the backbone was uucp serial links, I don't hear you mourning that. (generic you, not specific) The internet has frown. There are some things which can be done on a handshake and a smile, a global network isn't one of them. Heck, if all I needed was a connection to the MAE to get global routing, I'd run a ds-3 to my house and be done with it (its only about 3 miles from my house to MAE East, maybe 5).
(2) There is no connectivity gain for a national provider to peer with a single-attached organizaiton as all these organizations have transit providers that are present at multiple interconnects.
This is a chicken and egg scenario. If CompanyX could get to everywhere without buying a link to an upstream as well as their connection to the MAE, well, then they wouldn't buy the connection to the upstream provider. The real point should be that losing connectivity to all whopping X,000 of their customers where X is between 1 and 9 is really not all that big a deal, netwise.
(3) There is a huge investment involved to build a national backbone. Many providers currently do "hot-potato" routing (closed-exit) because of this cost. Peering with a single-attached organization would require much more backbone investment as traffic to this organization needs to be carried across the backbone, while the cost for this single-attached organization would be small (one DS3 to an interconnect).
This is somewhat of a paper tiger. This singly homed is also not nearly so likely to generate as much traffic as some of the larger backbones, and you are only carrying /your customers'/ traffic to them. One way or another, so long as you are peering and not transiting, any packets that cross your network are for the good of /your customers/. Please keep that in mind, but I digress...
Regarding the RS (I have many friends there, and they have done many good work), let me echo the fundamental issues that Steve Heimlich has pointed out, would you rather have your peering policy enforced by yourself or by a third party? Would you rather develop a dependency on a third party (which may not be there a few years down the road) to deliver the critical service or depend on yourself?
As a representative of Erol's I can say that I would want to directly peer with MCI. Sprint, ANS, UUnet and a few others, all of the people annoucing one or two routes I would likely be better serverd as hearing through the RA until which time as I have lots of free processor/memory/everything else on my router doing the peering, at which point I would be more than willing to peer with anyone who I could be assured was technically competent. (Basical;ly I am not /dependant/ on getting to a lot of those smaller sites, so I don't very much care if I lose them somehow).
-- Enke (speaking only for myself)
Justin Newton * You have to change just to stay Internet Architect * caught up. Erol's Internet Services *
On Tue, 30 Apr 1996, Justin W. Newton wrote:
This is a chicken and egg scenario. If CompanyX could get to everywhere without buying a link to an upstream as well as their connection to the MAE, well, then they wouldn't buy the connection to the upstream provider. The real point should be that losing connectivity to all whopping X,000 of their customers where X is between 1 and 9 is really not all that big a deal, netwise.
Not true. It is a VERY big deal if too many blocks of X,000 sites are not globally reachable because it would destroy the image of the Internet as a single cohesive network aka "the Net" withe the emphasis on the word "the". And I think peering agreements based on a handshake will always be viable in the global Internet. It's not like other businesses. The net is "real-time" in your face stuff that customers expect to be working on a 7/24 basis. There isn't any room for weasel words and slimy dealings. Remember that there are folks like Bob Metcalfe who would dearly love to see the global Internet to move to a settlements based system in which every byte is charged a fee for transport because that would involve installing the infrastructure that would make micro-money transactions possible. See his current InfoWorld column http://www.infoworld.com/pageone/opinions/metcalfe.htm which I found incredibly vituperative. This man clearly has a grudge against one or more Internet operators. I don't believe it is in anyone's best interests, not even Metcalfe's or 3COM's, to have the huge recordkeeping and billing bureaucracy that would be needed to do micromoney, even though I could personally earn a lot of money by selling my written works that way. In the long run we are better off pushing the network infrastructure into the noise that we don't even care about paying for on a daily basis like your basic phone service or the roads and highways infrastructure. If we want to get to that point, we need to help along the small players all we can. Sometimes it involves "tough love" like Sprint's route filters, sometimes it is just sharing information on lists like this and the IETF lists or at meetings like NANOG or IETF. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
On Tue, 30 Apr 1996, Justin W. Newton wrote:
Unrestricted peering policy would accelerate rolling of the snowball, and lead to the collapse of an interconnect. In order for Internet to survive, this snowball effect got to stop. ... or the hardware has to be manufactured to support it. /Some day/ there
If the current trend continues, IXP's may start seeing exponential growth curves, especially as more of them emerge. I can't think of very many hardware manufacturers that have been able to keep up with that kind of demand for better equipment. Hardware can be designed and built to meet demands on performance, sometimes even on cost. Growth is much more difficult to account for.
are going to be 500 companies at the interconnects, and they are /all/ going to be important players, or that is at least a likely scenario. Will this be next year? No. Unrestricted peering policies are gone, the internet is not what it once was. "There was a day when anyone could peer with anyone..." Yeah, there was also a day when the backbone was uucp serial links, I don't hear you mourning that. (generic you, not specific) The internet has frown. There are some things which can be done on a handshake and a smile, a global network isn't one of them.
Dunno about you, but I don't recall a day of unrestricted peering. There may not have been lawyerized, codified policies you see now, but you still had to convince NSP X that you knew what you were doing. Said policies are allegedly attempting the same thing, but that's another thread.
Heck, if all I needed was a connection to the MAE to get global routing, I'd run a ds-3 to my house and be done with it (its only about 3 miles from my house to MAE East, maybe 5).
Hmm...how many PC's and workstations do you have at home to fill a DS3 with? ;-)
(2) There is no connectivity gain for a national provider to peer with a single-attached organizaiton as all these organizations have transit providers that are present at multiple interconnects. This is a chicken and egg scenario. If CompanyX could get to everywhere without buying a link to an upstream as well as their connection to the MAE, well, then they wouldn't buy the connection to the upstream provider. The real point should be that losing connectivity to all whopping X,000 of their customers where X is between 1 and 9 is really not all that big a deal, netwise.
Not a big deal to whom? It certainly is to those customers, and to CompanyX. And probably to a percentage of the rest of the net.population, who now can't get to Joe's Whiz-Bang homepage. And who's making a decision on whether they have connectivity? (or what does this have to do with chickens and eggs?)
(3) There is a huge investment involved to build a national backbone. Many providers currently do "hot-potato" routing (closed-exit) because of this cost. Peering with a single-attached organization would require much more backbone investment as traffic to this organization needs to be carried across the backbone, while the cost for this single-attached organization would be small (one DS3 to an interconnect). This is somewhat of a paper tiger. This singly homed is also not nearly so likely to generate as much traffic as some of the larger backbones, and you are only carrying /your customers'/ traffic to them. One way or another, so long as you are peering and not transiting, any packets that cross your network are for the good of /your customers/. Please keep that in mind, but I digress...
Actually, you're very much on-topic, and this is true; however, closest-exit/hot-potato routing depends on asymmetric division of traffic to share load between peers. The one who ends up backhauling the traffic is the one with the bicoastal DS3 backbone, with none of the load shared by the single-homed peer. Were the single-homed peer not single-homed, the large peer could hand off the "potato" much closer to its source. [RS peering]
As a representative of Erol's I can say that I would want to directly peer with MCI. Sprint, ANS, UUnet and a few others, all of the people annoucing one or two routes I would likely be better serverd as hearing through the RA until which time as I have lots of free processor/memory/everything else on my router doing the peering, at which point I would be more than willing to peer with anyone who I could be assured was technically competent. (Basical;ly I am not /dependant/ on getting to a lot of those smaller sites, so I don't very much care if I lose them somehow).
This is a risky attitude. Simply because those sites are smaller than you doesn't mean you can force them down by refusing to peer. You do have a relatively large dialup customer base, but explaining to your customers exactly why they can't get to <interesting route> from your service, but can from GrumbleSmurf down the road, can be tricky when you burn bridges. I'd place more emphasis on the "technically competent" aspect of your policy than the "I don't much need your routes anyhow" motivation. // Matt Zimmerman Chief of System Management NetRail, Inc. // mdz@netrail.net sales@netrail.net // (703) 524-4800 [voice] (703) 524-4802 [data] (703) 534-5033 [fax]
participants (3)
-
Justin W. Newton -
Matt Zimmerman -
Michael Dillon