routing around Sprint's depeering damage
There are at least three ways to address this Sprint / Cogent partition: 1. Send Vint Cerf back up to Capitol Hill with a doomsday scenario of what would happen to the economy if anyone else gets as stupid as Sprint has been, begging for laws that any tier-1 or tier-2 who wants to de-peer needs to provide all their customers and peers with 90 day notice or face stiff fines. Send John Schnizlein along with him to get the House Communications Director an Akamai hosting account. Repeat the "eyeballs-or-data, which is more valuable" mantra whether or not there are still forty Republicans in the Senate. 2. Pick up some more fiber, dust off the router manuals, and allow and recommend that tier-1s transit any third party tier-1-to-tier-1 traffic. 3. Both. Which is the best way?
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Larry Sheldon <LarrySheldon@cox.net> wrote:
More regs and more laws is certainly not in the running.
Why?
How about: If there is a need, somebody will provide at a suitable price? If no body steps up, we don't need it.
There seems to be ample evidence, in many arenas, that naked capitalism can have disastrous results.
Marc Farnum Rendino wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Larry Sheldon <LarrySheldon@cox.net> wrote:
More regs and more laws is certainly not in the running.
Why?
That is the way government works, too much, too late, in the wrong place.
How about: If there is a need, somebody will provide at a suitable price? If no body steps up, we don't need it.
There seems to be ample evidence, in many arenas, that naked capitalism can have disastrous results.
There is no evidence whatever that "naked" capitalism has ever been allowed to operate.
How about: If there is a need, somebody will provide at a suitable price? If no body steps up, we don't need it.
There seems to be ample evidence, in many arenas, that naked capitalism can have disastrous results.
And there are lot of examples and ample evidence in history, in many areas, that complete regulation, complete socialism can have disastrous results as well. If you want to have a good idea on how the internet will look like in the US after regulation, simply look at Australia. The government imposed regulation early on in internet infrastructure market caused nothing but raising the entry barrier for small ISPs, only creating government-approved monopoly for major telcos/carriers. Only such regulation creates a situation where it is cheaper and affordable for a smaller ISP to route traffic from .AU to .US, then back to .AU than interconnect directly with incumbent carrier in their own country. So yes, more regulations definitely help the internet indeed (by adding extra 300ms into the process). Instead of calling for socialist/communist policies to regulate the transit industry, the single-homed networks can simply multihome. Because of Cogent, the cost of transit has come down to single-digit per megabit that even after adding transport costs, it's now affordable to add a 2nd internet connection for practically most organizations out there, especially in the continental US (the same capitalism that you call 'disatrous results' is the same capitalism that brought cheap dollars/meg pricing, allowing smaller companies to multihome now when they couldn't afford to do so in the past). As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. If you need that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should you rely on government for more regulation. No one can help you but yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one fails. This is a simple business logic. James
James Jun wrote:
As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. ...
Ah yes, I suspect we can get all the network operators here to agree that any customer of another ISP should buy a second connection "just in case". Maybe this breakage will turn out to be the best way for everyone to double their customer base overnight. But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work, two connections at home, two connections for each mobile device, just to ensure that when large providers stop working together you can still reach what you need to reach. Matthew Kaufman matthew@eeph.com http://www.matthew.at
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work, two connections at home, two connections for each mobile device, just to ensure that when large providers stop working together you can still reach what you need to reach.
I think you're misinterpreting what I'm trying to say. The consumers/end-users don't necessarily have to multihome. The problem is the content providers/web hosters sitting single-homed on either networks, when most of them are physically sitting in better environment to multihome (i.e. a datacenter) than consumers. A consumer can be single homed to Sprint or Cogent, but when the other side (the content) is multihomed, you'll simply take new route to get to that content. My point is, any business providing services over internet (this excludes mobile devices, end-user/consumers) should be multihoming themselves if they are serious about uptime. James
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work, two connections at home, two connections for each mobile device, just to ensure that when large providers stop working together you can still reach what you need to reach.
I think you're misinterpreting what I'm trying to say.
The consumers/end-users don't necessarily have to multihome. The problem is the content providers/web hosters sitting single-homed on either networks, when most of them are physically sitting in better environment to multihome (i.e. a datacenter) than consumers.
A consumer can be single homed to Sprint or Cogent, but when the other side (the content) is multihomed, you'll simply take new route to get to that content. My point is, any business providing services over internet (this excludes mobile devices, end-user/consumers) should be multihoming themselves if they are serious about uptime.
So my Sprint EVDO (hypothetical, not real) can't get to the DSL line I've got through $cheap-Cogent-bandwidth-DSL-provider (also hypothetical, not something I have, but I know of such a provider. Given they're not at fault in this dispute, I will not name them.) So what you're saying is that I'm expected ... to go get myself some space in a data center so that I can buy some more Internet connectivity in the data center so that I can bounce my VPN connection from my laptop to my home office via the data center? That's insane. Let's try to remember that the Internet isn't the sort of "content provider" and "end-user" thing you're pretending it is. This model is loosely true for some large percentage of traffic, but it is by no means the only usage model. Further, why should content networks be taxed extra in the manner you suggest? Are you willing to mandate that customers in Sprint and Cogent colocation centers must be offered reasonable pricing on connections to alternate providers? You really don't want all your content providers multihoming in any case, there are far too many of them, and encouraging each one to solve its own connectivity problem will result in an explosion of the routing table. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Matthew Kaufman wrote:
James Jun wrote:
As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. ...
Ah yes, I suspect we can get all the network operators here to agree that any customer of another ISP should buy a second connection "just in case". Maybe this breakage will turn out to be the best way for everyone to double their customer base overnight.
I have a probably dumb question. Even if a company were of large enough wallet to have, say, a single redundant connection, how could it evaluate the partition problem in order to choose the "best" connection (where "best" is a function of overall connectivity, say) ? It seems to me that that's a really, really hard problem. And surely isn't a static one-off kind of calculation, right? Mike
On 2008-11-02-10:14:14, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@eeph.com> wrote:
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work [...]
This is less than clear, and largely dependent on a specific organization's [in]ability to function if their internets go down. End-site multihoming in some form or fashion is a growing requirement, and folk thinking otherwise need to get their heads out of sand. If anything, these recent de-peerings underscore the lack of wisdom in end users connecting to (or purchasing CDN services from) members of the tier 1 club directly. -a
On 11/2/08, Adam Rothschild <asr+nanog@latency.net> wrote:
On 2008-11-02-10:14:14, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@eeph.com> wrote:
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at
work [...]
This is less than clear, and largely dependent on a specific organization's [in]ability to function if their internets go down. End-site multihoming in some form or fashion is a growing requirement, and folk thinking otherwise need to get their heads out of sand.
If anything, these recent de-peerings underscore the lack of wisdom in end users connecting to (or purchasing CDN services from) members of the tier 1 club directly.
Thank goodness IPv6 cleanly supports end-site multihoming so we won't ever face messy issues like this in the Internet of tomorrow! Oh, wait--could this end up being a damper on IPv6 deployment? "I'd like to move to IPv6, but I can't multihome in IPv6, and I've seen what happens when you don't multihome--so I'll stick with v4, where I at least have the option to multihome to try to avoid being screwed when the net is partitioned like this." Hopefully people recognize that we're rapidly being caught between the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis here; on the one hand, we don't want to mandate universal connectivity throughout the Internet, we want to allow networks to engage in squabbles like this, and we tell companies "hey, this is the reality of the internet--you want your customers to have more reliable connectivity, you need to multihome" But at the same time, we're telling them "IPv4 is running out, you need to look at moving to IPv6; oh, by the way, in IPv6, you don't get to multihome, you get your addresses from your upstream, and you're stuck with them; you can buy from multiple upstreams, but you'll have to use some type of kludge to switch addresses to make use of the additional paths." With network partitioning becoming more and more an accepted fact of the Internet, if multihoming in IPv6 is not made at least as easy as it is in IPv4, companies who cannot get PI space will not move to IPv6 for any serious production traffic; they have heard us chant the "you must multihome in order to reach the entire Internet, partitions happen on a regular basis, and we refuse to let anyone put regulations in place to prevent them" mantra enough times to realize that the only viable business model for the forseeable future is to use IPv4 addresses in an end-site multihomed fashion. This is the bed we have created for ourselves; why do we spend so much time here wailing and wishing it were otherwise? Matt
On 11/2/08, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
On 11/2/08, Adam Rothschild <asr+nanog@latency.net> wrote:
On 2008-11-02-10:14:14, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@eeph.com> wrote:
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at
This is less than clear, and largely dependent on a specific organization's [in]ability to function if their internets go down. End-site multihoming in some form or fashion is a growing requirement, and folk thinking otherwise need to get their heads out of sand.
If anything, these recent de-peerings underscore the lack of wisdom in end users connecting to (or purchasing CDN services from) members of the tier 1 club directly.
Thank goodness IPv6 cleanly supports end-site multihoming so we won't ever face messy issues like this in the Internet of tomorrow!
Oh, wait--could this end up being a damper on IPv6 deployment?
"I'd like to move to IPv6, but I can't multihome in IPv6, and I've seen what happens when you don't multihome--so I'll stick with v4, where I at least have the option to multihome to try to avoid being screwed when the net is partitioned like this."
Hopefully people recognize that we're rapidly being caught between the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis here; on the one hand, we don't want to mandate universal connectivity throughout the Internet, we want to allow networks to engage in squabbles like this, and we tell companies "hey, this is the reality of the internet--you want your customers to have more reliable connectivity, you need to multihome"
But at the same time, we're telling them "IPv4 is running out, you need to look at moving to IPv6; oh, by the way, in IPv6, you don't get to multihome, you get your addresses from your upstream, and you're stuck with them; you can buy from multiple upstreams, but you'll have to use some type of kludge to switch addresses to make use of the additional paths."
With network partitioning becoming more and more an accepted fact of the Internet, if multihoming in IPv6 is not made at least as easy as it is in IPv4, companies who cannot get PI space will not move to IPv6 for any serious production traffic; they have heard us chant the "you must multihome in order to reach the entire Internet, partitions happen on a regular basis, and we refuse to let anyone put regulations in place to prevent them" mantra enough times to realize that the only viable business model for the forseeable future is to use IPv4 addresses in an end-site multihomed fashion.
This is the bed we have created for ourselves; why do we spend so much time here wailing and wishing it were otherwise?
Matt
And, just to converge one more set of threads together, including the recent talk at the NANOG in LA; for those of you complaining about routing table explosion, who are having to take steps to filter out routes so that your table still fits in the 256K memory slots your current kit affords, and for those who are panic-stricken over the thought of having to upgrade all your routers in case we allow multihoming in IPv6--it is events like this that drive the message home that multihoming is a requirement even for smaller businesses in order to stay well connected in the Internet of today; and it is a result of this drive for ever-smaller entities to be multihomed that will drive up routing table size, and force networks to upgrade their routers. So--don't want to be forced to upgrade your routers? Perhaps mandated interconnection arrangements might not seem so terrible to your management, if it means you can save millions on capex for router upgrades. I think it's only a matter of time before we're forced to choose between shutting up and doing forced technology refreshes across wide swaths of the internet to support the swelling routing tables that are the direct result of additional multihoming due to events like this (which I'm sure will make the router vendors quite happy), or accepting mandated interconnection and universal connectivity requirements which will keep the routing table size down, as people won't have the same pressures forcing them to multihome, and will let them contemplate moving to IPv6 without fear of being partitioned (which I'm sure will make the smaller businesses happier, as well as the network engineers who will no longer have quite the gun pointed at their head forcing memory upgrades of all their router kit). Personally, I'm betting on the latter outcome, as much as I don't like it. Governments seem to be unable to resist getting involved whenever it seems that some fundamental linchpin of their society is at risk of faltering or failing without intervention. And unfortunately, I've not seen anyone offer a solution yet that solves all the issues: 1) Prevent or address partitioning of the internet due to depeerings 2) Provide reasonable assurances to end sites of near-universal internet access, barring reasonable outages, maintenance periods, etc. without the need for all end-sites to multihome to multiple upstream providers 3) Provide a reasonable migration path to IPv6, either by re-drafting the IPv6 addressing guidelines to allow widespread end-site multihoming, or by providing assurances that single-homing will not lead to long-term widespread network partitionings due to depeerings or other disputes 4) Limit the potential explosion of routing table entries and forced technology refreshes due to the lack of universal connectivity and the resulting demand for multihoming. I'm sure I'm just nearsighted; but I don't see any other way to solve the situation other than through regulation. Can someone else help enlighten me as to how else we can deal with these converging, conflating issues forcing us towards a cliff, before we hit the IPv4 exhaustion point, and realize that we've backed ourselves into a corner and have no choice but to accept regulation--because we can't upgrade all our networks fast enough to allow everyone to multihome in IPv6, and we're not willing to self-regulate ourselves in the IPv6 world to forbid intentional creation of widespread network partitions? Thanks! Matt (hoping it's just the lack of breakfast making him paranoid this morning)
Adam Rothschild wrote:
On 2008-11-02-10:14:14, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@eeph.com> wrote:
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work [...]
This is less than clear, and largely dependent on a specific organization's [in]ability to function if their internets go down. End-site multihoming in some form or fashion is a growing requirement, and folk thinking otherwise need to get their heads out of sand.
There was an implicit (and sometimes contractually explicit) social contract associated with buying from a Tier 1 provider. That was that I'd pay a premium for connecting, and that everyone could reach me. That's never a guarantee - I've had both upstream peering games and more conventional network outages in the last 20 years than I can conveniently count. But the social contract was that I was not going to be bitten by my provider playing games with other providers. If I am going to be bitten by that, then I have to take additional mitigating measures, which includes multihoming for smaller sites than I used to do. That costs money. In this particular economic climate, if I have to tell site owners that they need to pay more money in connectivity, hardware, engineering, and ondoing administration time to multihome, they are going to tell me to make it up on the back end, which means that paying for Tier 1 grade connectivity is no longer affordable. Somewhere, inside Sprint, is a salesperson who understands this and has been trying to tell his or her coworkers. Apparently to no good effect...
If anything, these recent de-peerings underscore the lack of wisdom in end users connecting to (or purchasing CDN services from) members of the tier 1 club directly.
The recent depeerings have two effects: One, they devalue higher priced Tier 1 ISP connectivity because they reintroduce the political/financial depeering risk into overall connectivity reliability, and two, it pushes the boundary downwards in both small/mid tier ISPs and content sites where multihoming is either necessary or strongly advised. That leads to additional cost and engineering time, a need to shift high level industry effort more towards supporting new multihoming sites again (ugh, this is never a fun surge to deal with, as everyone finds out the things BGP is bad for all over again). All on top of the looming IPv6 deployment surge we're all facing. Not to be alarmist, but what the @#$#@%@#(*&$% ? -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com
On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
Ah yes, I suspect we can get all the network operators here to agree that any customer of another ISP should buy a second connection "just in case". Maybe this breakage will turn out to be the best way for everyone to double their customer base overnight.
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work, two connections at home, two connections for each mobile device, just to ensure that when large providers stop working together you can still reach what you need to reach.
No, but the providers who provide those connections should be multihomed. If they're not, I'd consider switching providers. Simple as that. jms
No, but the providers who provide those connections should be multihomed. If they're not, I'd consider switching providers. Simple as that.
jms
multihomed to whichever parties decide to generate split ups on purpose in the intarrwebbz.. meaning: all of them.. (you can never tell which ones will get the idea to depeer next, so you have to be multihomed to all of them or this can still happen) -this- time its sprint and cogent, next time it could be level3 and sprint, etc, now, do you want to multihome on all of them, just to avoid problems when they purposely and actively break the internet, or would you rather just tell them not to do it.. what should happen here is their customers just enforcing a contract change that they contractually have to make every possible effort to peer with anyone or the customers leave... you can buy shares in both companies, so its also possible to cause a riot at their shareholders meeting if this is a major problem to your connectivity, and tell them never to do that again.
X-CONTACT-FILTER-MATCH: "nanog"
On Nov 3, 2008, at 9:41 AM, HRH Sven Olaf Prinz von CyberBunker- Kamphuis MP wrote:
No, but the providers who provide those connections should be multihomed. If they're not, I'd consider switching providers. Simple as that.
multihomed to whichever parties decide to generate split ups on purpose in the intarrwebbz.. meaning: all of them.. (you can never tell which ones will get the idea to depeer next, so you have to be multihomed to all of them or this can still happen)
I am afraid you are confused. No, you do not have to attach to every network unless you think every network is going to disconnect from every other network simultaneously. (Would there even be an Internet then?) If you are attached to two transit-free networks, you are guaranteed connectivity to the entire Internet unless there is more than one bifurcation simultaneously. And not just any two bifurcations. Specifically, both of your upstreams would have to depeer the same transit free network at the same time. Attach to three, and it would require all 3 to depeer someone simultaneously to affect you. Etc., etc.
what should happen here is their customers just enforcing a contract change that they contractually have to make every possible effort to peer with anyone or the customers leave...
Good luck with that. -- TTFN, patrick
Patrick wrote:
On Nov 3, 2008, at 9:41 AM, HRH Sven Olaf Prinz von CyberBunker- Kamphuis MP wrote:
No, but the providers who provide those connections should be multihomed. If they're not, I'd consider switching providers. Simple as that.
multihomed to whichever parties decide to generate split ups on purpose in the intarrwebbz.. meaning: all of them.. (you can never tell which ones will get the idea to depeer next, so you have to be multihomed to all of them or this can still happen)
I am afraid you are confused. No, you do not have to attach to every network unless you think every network is going to disconnect from every other network simultaneously. (Would there even be an Internet then?)
If you are attached to two transit-free networks, you are guaranteed connectivity to the entire Internet unless there is more than one bifurcation simultaneously. And not just any two bifurcations. Specifically, both of your upstreams would have to depeer the same transit free network at the same time.
Attach to three, and it would require all 3 to depeer someone simultaneously to affect you.
Look at this from the connectivity reliability point of view. With a technical failure, people will start rushing around to get it fixed, and NOCs will cooperate to provide ways around things that are down. Even for major fiber cuts, we see rapid restoration and low downtime. It seems to take major router or management software glitches to have large segments of the net down for all day. MTTR of a depeering is days or weeks. And it's not the sort of thing that people will cooperate to fix. Even worse - eventually we're going to have a legit outage on top of a depeering event, which will ruin a lot of people's days. When this gaming was active (depeering) in the 90s, I walked a couple of million dollars a year in connectivity away from one of the major offenders because my customers had to be able to get to me. I didn't really care what their business justification was - I was paying them for people to be able to reach me, and they couldn't do that. I have had a number of years of primarily being worried about software failures and diverse fiber being groomed behind my back. If depeering is again to be a major cause of outage time, in terms of customer seeing site down time per year, then I need to recalculate all my provider relationships again. Providers who are willing to play depeering games will be assessed a higher estimated outage time per year in my cost/benefits tradeoffs. They will either have to adjust costs appropriately or I will start walking sites again. Sprint isn't currently my direct provider anywhere, but they won't get a chance to become it again anywhere unless either they agree to stop playing peering games, or can lower prices to be competitive with networks with equivalent outage risks. I will not pay a premium cost for inferior ultimate reliability. -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com
if anyone is actually saying anything new here, please point it out. otherwise this seems like a lot of folk rehashing things from 1992 and every year since, trying to demonstrate how smart they are, which demonstrates how smart they are not. randy
Randy Bush wrote:
if anyone is actually saying anything new here, please point it out. otherwise this seems like a lot of folk rehashing things from 1992 and every year since, trying to demonstrate how smart they are, which demonstrates how smart they are not.
Not all of us have been on the list since 92 or other years. Not all of us are as informed about these things as you might be. This is one of the more on topic and informative threads (at least for me) in recent history on NANOG. :)
On 11/3/08, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
if anyone is actually saying anything new here, please point it out. otherwise this seems like a lot of folk rehashing things from 1992 and every year since, trying to demonstrate how smart they are, which demonstrates how smart they are not.
randy
With all due respect, Randy, we're rehashing the thread because the people who *were* around in 1992 failed miserably at fixing these issues then. Perhaps the new crop of people rehashing these issues will figure out a solution that eluded those who had the discussion in 1992, and we can fix the underlying problems so that the discussion need not continue happening every year. Until the underlying issues are fixed, though, I think it's useful to continue discussing and hashing out the problems in the hopes that we can make some forward progress towards solving the underlying issues. Asking people to not talk about areas of the network that are broken because you've heard it all before sounds like a very bad case of osterich-itis. If it's broke, let's try to fix it, not sit around doing our best trying not to talk about it. Matt
No, but the providers who provide those connections should be multihomed. If they're not, I'd consider switching providers. Simple as that.
Am I the only one to whom this sounds really strange? I really doubt that customers going to buy Sprint EVDO service are asking about "are you multihomed," or that they realize that they should ask such a question, or that the salesman would have any clue, and when the salesman tried to figure out what it meant, he'd come up with it equating to "how reliable is your service," to which he'd answer "Yes, of course, it's very reliable!" because he'd honestly never heard of a "peering dispute." This all gets back to a point that I've tried to impress on several people who are all-too-fixated on contracts and how contracts will make it all work out in the end, or how it is too bad when that doesn't happen. We can all agree that, on a technical level, a provider here in the US cannot guarantee the reachability of portions of China on the end of two tin cans and a string, and to us, this seems obvious. However, it might take a little time to explain this to a non-technical person. However, when two networks that previously had a connection to each other, and who have no technical issue that prevents them from continuing such a connection, then decide to not only eliminate said connection and actively take steps that are meant to coerce the other network into some particular activity, that's something a little different. My concern isn't about the letter of the contract between Sprint and their customers, or the letter of the contract between Cogent and their customers. My concern is that they are being sold "Internet service," and sooner or later someone is going to notice that the incomplete Internet service being delivered is due to decisions actually made by the service provider(s). At this point, there's a very real possibility that the customer will argue that they interpreted the terms of the bandwidth contract to mean "best effort Internet" in the China example sense, not "best effort Internet" where the service provider decided a business strategy made making part of the Internet deliberately unreachable so that they could use their customers as traffic hostages was a good idea. At that point, we could see a court make a determination as to what the obligations are, or worse, we could see government interference with the operation of major networks. "Switch providers" is a nice sound bite, but the reality of it all is that most customers are locked into various types of contracts, and this is an expensive proposition, one that burdens the consumer. I am sure that each side can make a legitimate business case for the actions taken. I don't care. Ultimately, events like this are likely to be a driving force between some "network neutrality" regulation that we are all going to regret on some level. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
"Justin M. Streiner" <streiner@cluebyfour.org> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
Ah yes, I suspect we can get all the network operators here to agree that any customer of another ISP should buy a second connection "just in case". Maybe this breakage will turn out to be the best way for everyone to double their customer base overnight.
But seriously, it shouldn't be necessary to have two connections at work, two connections at home, two connections for each mobile device, just to ensure that when large providers stop working together you can still reach what you need to reach.
No, but the providers who provide those connections should be multihomed. If they're not, I'd consider switching providers. Simple as that.
As with fiber, the tendency for multiple diverse upstreams to be groomed together, and / or end up through the same physical pipe up the layers some, is nonzero and in some cases significantly high. The only way to actually reliably defeat that risk is to walk your ISP up the size chart to Tier 1 and total control of what you talk to. That was a much more attractive path in the mid-late 90s than it is today. -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com
James Jun wrote:
How about: If there is a need, somebody will provide at a suitable
price?
If no body steps up, we don't need it.
There seems to be ample evidence, in many arenas, that naked capitalism can have disastrous results.
And there are lot of examples and ample evidence in history, in many areas, that complete regulation, complete socialism can have disastrous results as well.
If you want to have a good idea on how the internet will look like in the US after regulation, simply look at Australia. The government imposed regulation early on in internet infrastructure market caused nothing but raising the entry barrier for small ISPs, only creating government-approved monopoly for major telcos/carriers. Only such regulation creates a situation where it is cheaper and affordable for a smaller ISP to route traffic from .AU to .US, then back to .AU than interconnect directly with incumbent carrier in their own country. So yes, more regulations definitely help the internet indeed (by adding extra 300ms into the process).
Instead of calling for socialist/communist policies to regulate the transit industry, the single-homed networks can simply multihome. Because of Cogent, the cost of transit has come down to single-digit per megabit that even after adding transport costs, it's now affordable to add a 2nd internet connection for practically most organizations out there, especially in the continental US (the same capitalism that you call 'disatrous results' is the same capitalism that brought cheap dollars/meg pricing, allowing smaller companies to multihome now when they couldn't afford to do so in the past).
As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. If you need that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should you rely on government for more regulation. No one can help you but yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one fails. This is a simple business logic.
James
If things were truly operating as designed the internet would be able to automatically route around this depeering..the problem is not only do these two depeer but they also totally block any other traffic coming in from the other side. This is not how things should be done..disconnect the peering but let the traffic get automatically route around the disruption as it should.
William Warren wrote:
If things were truly operating as designed the internet would be able to automatically route around this depeering..the problem is not only do these two depeer but they also totally block any other traffic coming in from the other side. This is not how things should be done..disconnect the peering but let the traffic get automatically route around the disruption as it should.
Some of us gun-clingers think involuntary servitude is a seriously bad idea.
As much as we blame Cogent and Sprint for breaking the internet, I also have no sympathy for individual single-homed downstream customers on either networks. If you are complaining about Sprint<->Cogent depeering and have customers demanding for your mission-critical services, then you are just as negligent to not have multihomed before all of this happened. If you need that 100% uptime guarantee, you shouldn't rely on single carrier, nor should you rely on government for more regulation. No one can help you but yourself in ensuring your uptime-- so perhaps look at your own setup and decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one fails. This is a simple business logic.
Is it just me, or is this awful logic? Really, we DO NOT WANT every site that considers itself to have "mission critical needs" to be multihomed. This would lead to an explosion in the size of the routing table. When two "Tier 1 Wannabes" get into a peering dispute and start deliberately breaking reachability, this is an artifically-generated crisis. It certainly strikes me that someone here isn't making "best-effort" attempts to supply Internet access. One would wish that the customers of that guilty party have contracts which require "best-effort" attempts to provide Internet access, which would mean that a peering spat that results in visible traffic failures ought to open the door for customers to migrate ... elsewhere. Of course, while that might be fair, it isn't compatible with the real world. However, requiring everyone to get a second Internet connection is not realistic. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Sunday 02 November 2008 10:28:31 Joe Greco wrote:
previous poster wrote:
so perhaps look at your own setup and decide that you need that 2nd connection to back you up when first one fails. This is a simple business logic.
Is it just me, or is this awful logic?
Awful or not, this is the enduser business logic.
Really, we DO NOT WANT every site that considers itself to have "mission critical needs" to be multihomed. This would lead to an explosion in the size of the routing table.
Playing enduser devil's advocate here. "Oh my! You poor provider and your routing table explosion! It's not my problem you need to forklift upgrade your routing gear due to this settlement-free interconnect versus transit stupidity: my business is made or broken by reachability, and I WILL do what I have to do to get that reachability. If it costs you, boo hoo." The more peering disagreements and the more news that "The Internet" is "broken in half!" reaches endusers, the more endusers' boards of directors will require multihoming, and the more it will cost every provider, and, by extension, every enduser. Endusers have been sold the faulty concept of "The Internet" (which we all know only halfway exists as a loose melange of voluntary interconnections to begin with) and they are demanding what they were sold. And, like it or not, each provider's very existence depends upon the endusers' pocketbooks.
Folks - At some point, a society decides that X is important enough to the society as a whole, that something official is in the overall interest. Roads, immigration, whatever. That it's necessary to require that some things be done (or not be done). Peering may very well not be in that category, however I think it's worth discussion. - Marc
Marc Farnum Rendino wrote:
Folks -
At some point, a society decides that X is important enough to the society as a whole, that something official is in the overall interest. Roads, immigration, whatever. That it's necessary to require that some things be done (or not be done).
Peering may very well not be in that category, however I think it's worth discussion.
- Marc
My response would be to point out the behavior of the incumbents in the telcom industry vs. the upstarts; which are the ones responsible for most of the innovation that actually got delivered to the market? Regulations raise barriers to entry; which favors the incumbent over the upstart. Roads are a bad analogy and will only serve to obscure the discussion. --Patrick
I'll make one comment before 'Alex the Hammer' closes this discussion for straying into politics. Clearly regulating the incumbents to unbundle local loops has worked very well in some European countries (France and possibly others). Clearly US financial deregulation has cost the world dearly. So regulation is the appropriate response in some cases (I hope that is clear given the world financial system almost went under a few weeks ago). However, it is not clear what a well crafted peering regulation would do that is different than what the market has achieved already. Sensible and hence pragmatic government mandated peering would require companies having equal bilateral traffic flows to peer or buy transit from each other. That would not necessarily preclude the current peering dispute. Forcing companies to peer when it is not in their interest is unlikely to be supported by the courts in any country, even the French and German courts. Sooner or later these two companies in conflict will either return to peering or one of them will buy transit to reach the other. It is a short term issue that probably doesn't merit government intervention Regards, Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 13-15, rue Sedaine, 75011 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com Wireless: 1-212-444-8829. French Landline: 33+1+4355+8224 French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97. AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com rodbeck@erols.com ``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'' Albert Einstein.
On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Rod Beck wrote:
It is a short term issue that probably doesn't merit government intervention
The only government intervention I can imagine as being productive would be to mandate what the "Internet" is, and if someone is selling access to it, mandate that customers can demand a refund in case the "Internet Access" doesn't provide access to enough a big part of it in a well enough working manner. If two parties were both to lose enough money over cutting off peering, then perhaps they'd make sure there was a backup path that at least worked well enough to enable them to refuse to refund their respective customers. I see lots of problems with definitions in this model, but it's worked (for some definition of "worked") in other areas and it might work here as well. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
The only government intervention I can imagine as being productive would be to mandate what the "Internet" is, and if someone is selling access to it, mandate that customers can demand a refund in case the "Internet Access" doesn't provide access to enough a big part of it in a well enough working manner.
In some parts of the US, we already have that. We call it "Contract Law" where I live. You "make a deal" with somebody, with notes on paper about what each of you think is to be delivered in each direction, then when everybody agrees the notes accurately reflect the agreement, everybody signs it. If somebody reneges, the lawyers get rich and maybe a repair is worked out, maybe not. But if that doesn't work, probably nothing else was going to either.
At 09:33 AM 11/2/2008, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Rod Beck wrote:
It is a short term issue that probably doesn't merit government intervention
The only government intervention I can imagine as being productive would be to mandate what the "Internet" is, and if someone is selling access to it, mandate that customers can demand a refund in case the "Internet Access" doesn't provide access to enough a big part of it in a well enough working manner.
Precisely the issue I am concerned about. End consumers cannot go off and multihome easily. Comcast got in trouble for altering traffic flows to its residential customers. Sprint has broken access to its EVDO customers. Does it make sense for end customers to be protected from companies providing access to only parts of the Internet? Sprint could, in response to this partitioning, buy some transit to provide complete connectivity to its EVDO users. But unless they're willing to allow termination of contracts for cell phones and data cards without penalty, consumers are NOT free to switch carriers, and they are not getting unfettered access to the Internet as was sold to them. The other carriers in the space aren't much better. Verizon got in trouble for selling "unlimited" access via data cards, then cutting people off who used it heavily. Is it worthwhile for the government and/or the courts to set rules for such? As a consumer, I would prefer the government protect me from large businesses selling me one thing, then delivering another. Consumer protection is a valid and useful function of government, IMO.
Well, selling you an "unlimited" account and them terminating that contract if you use "to much" is one thing, that is a stated lack of a limit in your contract. There is no delivery guarantee of your IP packets in your contract, adding one would be a rather bad idea since there is no delivery guarantee in IP that your service is based on and that would open a carrier to liabilities if someone was using a firewall for instance since that is effectivly limiting your delivery to that machine. What you are buying is access to Sprints network, and transit effectivly on Sprints view of the Internet, and that is what they deliver really.. ------------------------------ Anders Lindbäck anders.lindback@dnz.se On 2 nov 2008, at 16.01, Daniel Senie wrote:
At 09:33 AM 11/2/2008, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Rod Beck wrote:
It is a short term issue that probably doesn't merit government intervention
The only government intervention I can imagine as being productive would be to mandate what the "Internet" is, and if someone is selling access to it, mandate that customers can demand a refund in case the "Internet Access" doesn't provide access to enough a big part of it in a well enough working manner.
Precisely the issue I am concerned about. End consumers cannot go off and multihome easily. Comcast got in trouble for altering traffic flows to its residential customers. Sprint has broken access to its EVDO customers. Does it make sense for end customers to be protected from companies providing access to only parts of the Internet?
Sprint could, in response to this partitioning, buy some transit to provide complete connectivity to its EVDO users. But unless they're willing to allow termination of contracts for cell phones and data cards without penalty, consumers are NOT free to switch carriers, and they are not getting unfettered access to the Internet as was sold to them. The other carriers in the space aren't much better. Verizon got in trouble for selling "unlimited" access via data cards, then cutting people off who used it heavily.
Is it worthwhile for the government and/or the courts to set rules for such? As a consumer, I would prefer the government protect me from large businesses selling me one thing, then delivering another. Consumer protection is a valid and useful function of government, IMO.
Well, selling you an "unlimited" account and them terminating that contract if you use "to much" is one thing, that is a stated lack of a limit in your contract.
There is no delivery guarantee of your IP packets in your contract, adding one would be a rather bad idea since there is no delivery guarantee in IP that your service is based on and that would open a carrier to liabilities if someone was using a firewall for instance since that is effectivly limiting your delivery to that machine.
What you are buying is access to Sprints network, and transit effectivly on Sprints view of the Internet, and that is what they deliver really..
Based on that logic, it sounds like a fine time for me to get into the wireless market. I can save a ton of money by getting a 56k dialup line to $9.95/mo-company as an upstream connection, and just saying that I don't guarantee delivery of packets, and if my upstream service gets terminated for some reason, hey, my view of the Internet is pretty small. Come on. Really, an ISP has to make a reasonable effort to be able to reach other arbitrary destinations on the Internet. That they might not be able to promise access to obscure networks in the farthest portions of China on the end of two tin cans and a string is obvious. But when they can't get traffic across the street because they're actively buggering routes from an AS, well, that's different. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Nice interpretation of my statement.. A reasonable effort and a contractual guarantee are two different things, a reasonable effort could be defined as economicly feasable for instance. My point was that in Cogents case this is really a force majeure situation and in Sprints case unless you have a contract that defines an SLA with delivery to "the entire Internet" or something similar you do not really have case to break your contract or sue due to the de-peering as a breach of contract from Sprints side.. ------------------------------ Anders Lindbäck anders.lindback@dnz.se On 2 nov 2008, at 16.39, Joe Greco wrote:
Well, selling you an "unlimited" account and them terminating that contract if you use "to much" is one thing, that is a stated lack of a limit in your contract.
There is no delivery guarantee of your IP packets in your contract, adding one would be a rather bad idea since there is no delivery guarantee in IP that your service is based on and that would open a carrier to liabilities if someone was using a firewall for instance since that is effectivly limiting your delivery to that machine.
What you are buying is access to Sprints network, and transit effectivly on Sprints view of the Internet, and that is what they deliver really..
Based on that logic, it sounds like a fine time for me to get into the wireless market. I can save a ton of money by getting a 56k dialup line to $9.95/mo-company as an upstream connection, and just saying that I don't guarantee delivery of packets, and if my upstream service gets terminated for some reason, hey, my view of the Internet is pretty small.
Come on. Really, an ISP has to make a reasonable effort to be able to reach other arbitrary destinations on the Internet. That they might not be able to promise access to obscure networks in the farthest portions of China on the end of two tin cans and a string is obvious. But when they can't get traffic across the street because they're actively buggering routes from an AS, well, that's different.
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http:// www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e- mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Nice interpretation of my statement..
A reasonable effort and a contractual guarantee are two different things, a reasonable effort could be defined as economicly feasable for instance.
"Economically feasible?" If it isn't economically feasible, then repair your pricing model so that it becomes economically feasible. In some locales, it is actually illegal to sell for below cost.
My point was that in Cogents case this is really a force majeure situation and in Sprints case unless you have a contract that defines an SLA with delivery to "the entire Internet" or something similar you do not really have case to break your contract or sue due to the de-peering as a breach of contract from Sprints side..
So each and every customer has to negotiate with the Internet Service Provider to guarantee access to "the entire Internet"? You can't just approach an "Internet Service Provider" and expect that they provide you with the capability to connect to the Internet? When was the last time you went to a car dealership, bought a car, and they didn't include the gas tank, or tires, or seatbelts? "Oh, yeah, we've determined that it's economically more feasible to provide your car without a steering wheel. You can buy a different brand of car across the street if you happened to need a steering wheel." Do you begin to understand how retarded this sort of thing sounds to the average consumer? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
I am well aware how retarded this sounds to an average end-user, and for that I am glad I am not in a buisness where I need to explain it to them. But experience gained working for a party involved in a previus Cogent spat I am well aware of what the SLAs and service sold is. You can change provider, ask for compensation due to degraded service and what not, your service is still not defined as delivery to all of the Internet and nothing changes that fact.. But this discussion is going nowhere, and I dont really care about it either since a difference between what you buy and what you tought you bought is not really my problem.. :) ------------------------------ Anders Lindbäck anders.lindback@dnz.se On 2 nov 2008, at 17.10, Joe Greco wrote:
Nice interpretation of my statement..
A reasonable effort and a contractual guarantee are two different things, a reasonable effort could be defined as economicly feasable for instance.
"Economically feasible?"
If it isn't economically feasible, then repair your pricing model so that it becomes economically feasible.
In some locales, it is actually illegal to sell for below cost.
My point was that in Cogents case this is really a force majeure situation and in Sprints case unless you have a contract that defines an SLA with delivery to "the entire Internet" or something similar you do not really have case to break your contract or sue due to the de-peering as a breach of contract from Sprints side..
So each and every customer has to negotiate with the Internet Service Provider to guarantee access to "the entire Internet"? You can't just approach an "Internet Service Provider" and expect that they provide you with the capability to connect to the Internet?
When was the last time you went to a car dealership, bought a car, and they didn't include the gas tank, or tires, or seatbelts? "Oh, yeah, we've determined that it's economically more feasible to provide your car without a steering wheel. You can buy a different brand of car across the street if you happened to need a steering wheel."
Do you begin to understand how retarded this sort of thing sounds to the average consumer?
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http:// www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e- mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Nov 2, 2008, at 10:29 AM, Anders Lindbäck wrote:
Well, selling you an "unlimited" account and them terminating that contract if you use "to much" is one thing, that is a stated lack of a limit in your contract.
There is no delivery guarantee of your IP packets in your contract, adding one would be a rather bad idea since there is no delivery guarantee in IP that your service is based on and that would open a carrier to liabilities if someone was using a firewall for instance since that is effectivly limiting your delivery to that machine.
What you are buying is access to Sprints network, and transit effectivly on Sprints view of the Internet, and that is what they deliver really..
Sure. Note the "what I am buying" part of this. If I, as a Sprint customer, cannot get to the web sites, email servers, etc., that I need to with EVD0, I will blame Sprint if Sprint is dropping the packets. As a customer, I do not really care why this is occurring. Yes, I might cut them some slack if the site was hosted somewhere like the summit of Mt. Everest, but that does not apply here. For enforcing an SLA, it matters what the contract says, what the EULA says, etc. For keeping customers happy, it does not. Or, to put it another way, if Sprint's view of the Internet is not mine, my view of the Internet will rapidly no longer include being a customer of Sprint. Regards Marshall
------------------------------ Anders Lindbäck anders.lindback@dnz.se
On 2 nov 2008, at 16.01, Daniel Senie wrote:
At 09:33 AM 11/2/2008, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Rod Beck wrote:
It is a short term issue that probably doesn't merit government intervention
The only government intervention I can imagine as being productive would be to mandate what the "Internet" is, and if someone is selling access to it, mandate that customers can demand a refund in case the "Internet Access" doesn't provide access to enough a big part of it in a well enough working manner.
Precisely the issue I am concerned about. End consumers cannot go off and multihome easily. Comcast got in trouble for altering traffic flows to its residential customers. Sprint has broken access to its EVDO customers. Does it make sense for end customers to be protected from companies providing access to only parts of the Internet?
Sprint could, in response to this partitioning, buy some transit to provide complete connectivity to its EVDO users. But unless they're willing to allow termination of contracts for cell phones and data cards without penalty, consumers are NOT free to switch carriers, and they are not getting unfettered access to the Internet as was sold to them. The other carriers in the space aren't much better. Verizon got in trouble for selling "unlimited" access via data cards, then cutting people off who used it heavily.
Is it worthwhile for the government and/or the courts to set rules for such? As a consumer, I would prefer the government protect me from large businesses selling me one thing, then delivering another. Consumer protection is a valid and useful function of government, IMO.
It would be better to regulate some type of communication to customers *before* depeering occurs, much in the same way that the SEC requires publicly traded companies to communicate certain things a certain times to its shareholders. It's an indirect form of market intervention that can be pretty effective, because sometimes the unwillingness to communicate a bad thing to ones customers is enough incentive for the parties involved to "figure it out". Frank -----Original Message----- From: Rod Beck [mailto:Rod.Beck@hiberniaatlantic.com] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 8:24 AM To: Patrick Giagnocavo; nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: routing around Sprint's depeering damage I'll make one comment before 'Alex the Hammer' closes this discussion for straying into politics. Clearly regulating the incumbents to unbundle local loops has worked very well in some European countries (France and possibly others). Clearly US financial deregulation has cost the world dearly. So regulation is the appropriate response in some cases (I hope that is clear given the world financial system almost went under a few weeks ago). However, it is not clear what a well crafted peering regulation would do that is different than what the market has achieved already. Sensible and hence pragmatic government mandated peering would require companies having equal bilateral traffic flows to peer or buy transit from each other. That would not necessarily preclude the current peering dispute. Forcing companies to peer when it is not in their interest is unlikely to be supported by the courts in any country, even the French and German courts. Sooner or later these two companies in conflict will either return to peering or one of them will buy transit to reach the other. It is a short term issue that probably doesn't merit government intervention Regards, Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 13-15, rue Sedaine, 75011 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com Wireless: 1-212-444-8829. French Landline: 33+1+4355+8224 French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97. AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com rodbeck@erols.com ``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'' Albert Einstein.
It would be better to regulate some type of communication to customers *before* depeering occurs, much in the same way that the SEC requires publicly traded companies to communicate certain things a certain times to its shareholders.
Wait. Cogent's known about this risk factor for some time. Have they not included this in their 10-Q/K filings? Randy
Top of page 12: http://www.cogentco.com/Reports/10k_Report.pdf Doesn't refer to Sprint or anything. But this wasn't the regulation I was talking about -- I'm suggesting a public communication sent by the peered provider to its customers x days before the partitioning event occurs. This would at least give their customers some time to make alternative arrangements. Sprint's web page points out that even while it was turning down each of the peering sites one by one, several days apart, Cogent did not communicate anything to its customers about the impending last snip. Of course, it appears that Sprint didn't communicate anything to its customers, either. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Randy Epstein [mailto:repstein@chello.at] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 10:50 PM To: 'Frank Bulk'; 'Rod Beck'; 'Patrick Giagnocavo'; nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: routing around Sprint's depeering damage
It would be better to regulate some type of communication to customers *before* depeering occurs, much in the same way that the SEC requires publicly traded companies to communicate certain things a certain times to its shareholders.
Wait. Cogent's known about this risk factor for some time. Have they not included this in their 10-Q/K filings? Randy
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Rod Beck wrote:
I'll make one comment before 'Alex the Hammer' closes this discussion for straying into politics.
Clearly regulating the incumbents to unbundle local loops has worked very well in some European countries (France and possibly others). Clearly US financial deregulation has cost the world dearly.
So regulation is the appropriate response in some cases (I hope that is clear given the world financial system almost went under a few weeks ago).
I think you're making a faulty logical leap. Regulation to unbundle local loops works (sometimes) because it is a simple regulation that undoes what a previous regulation screwed up in the first place. That said, flattening the regulations to allow others to properly build their own loops would likely be more effective, except from a cost perspective it has a very high barrier to entry - however people could form smaller operations and simply service their community then grow that mesh outwards. That is an option I'd take over LLU far more readily. The issue for me comes from looking at the incumbents position. Many of these were government owned entities that were privatised, and then later in some cases gone to public market ownership. It sets a nasty precedent when you hand a company their privatisation, and then later on start bullying them around at a very high legal level. Those are still laws that apply across all other companies too - and in the worst of cases they are applied across a group of 'license holders' which simply further entrenches their position. Much of this also tends to alert governments to the fact that they are financially incentivised to hold their big money churning incumbents as the tax rewards are greater, and if they are an African government; hell, just force your incumbents to give you shares. So no, regulation is not an appropriate response in some cases, you've only confused it with deregulation, and it's one I'm not convinced about either... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJDqyj0FZZWLfHKjURAo4zAJ4od5mGi+OG644nmen+uEr+G6M/vQCfasQZ 7Ivu9l8zT5aMDliGTDZbk24= =jViN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
There are at least three ways to address this Sprint / Cogent partition I'd be fairly reluctant to allow the government to get involved in
Dave Blaine wrote: peering relationships too deeply. Australia has some very wierd consquences of our government doing so almost ten years on. One of those is which is that the "Gang of Four" have effectively set a floor price on domestic transit that is much higher than it should be - meaning that much content is delivered to us from overseas because the cost of delivering in Australia to those networks is too high to do so economically. Even a lot of Australian content is hosted overseas for this reason. Consider that this is in a land where the broadband providers don't have to deliver unlimited for a fixed price. (Would things have been different without this government directive? Hmm. Dunno. Feel free to discuss). -- Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:
There are at least three ways to address this Sprint / Cogent partition I'd be fairly reluctant to allow the government to get involved in
Dave Blaine wrote: peering relationships too deeply. Australia has some very wierd consquences of our government doing so almost ten years on. One of those is which is that the "Gang of Four" have effectively set a floor price on domestic transit that is much higher than it should be - meaning that much content is delivered to us from overseas because the cost of delivering in Australia to those networks is too high to do so economically. Even a lot of Australian content is hosted overseas for this reason.
Snap, same problem in ZA. Except it's a gang of two. You don't want your government involved, you want them to go away... Unfortunately our government misinterpreted "go away" as "get more involved, here lies money", so watch out for that too! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJDqlX0FZZWLfHKjURArQIAJ9yljqGppZorgD4Q99JOtCIMIB9igCfSg9D 9erfOYsDSM2IuQxylgcdVgE= =SGyH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Dave Blaine wrote:
There are at least three ways to address this Sprint / Cogent partition:
1. Send Vint Cerf back up to Capitol Hill with a doomsday scenario of what would happen to the economy if anyone else gets as stupid as Sprint has been, begging for laws that any tier-1 or tier-2 who wants to de-peer needs to provide all their customers and peers with 90 day notice or face stiff fines. Send John Schnizlein along with him to get the House Communications Director an Akamai hosting account. Repeat the "eyeballs-or-data, which is more valuable" mantra whether or not there are still forty Republicans in the Senate.
2. Pick up some more fiber, dust off the router manuals, and allow and recommend that tier-1s transit any third party tier-1-to-tier-1 traffic.
3. Both.
Which is the best way?
4. Multihome. ~Seth
* Seth Mattinen:
4. Multihome.
Or get upstream from someone who does, and who is small enough to be able to get additional upstream upon short notice. I know that this solution isn't always cost-effective. 8-/ (Multihoming alone isn't a solution because it's hard to figure out how independent your peering partners are.)
Florian Weimer wrote:
* Seth Mattinen:
4. Multihome.
Or get upstream from someone who does, and who is small enough to be able to get additional upstream upon short notice. I know that this solution isn't always cost-effective. 8-/
(Multihoming alone isn't a solution because it's hard to figure out how independent your peering partners are.)
That's the easy part in the US: multihome with Verizon, Level3, Cogent, Sprint and AT&T :))
participants (30)
-
Adam Rothschild -
Anders Lindbäck -
Charles Wyble -
Colin Alston -
Daniel Senie -
Dave Blaine -
Eugeniu Patrascu -
Florian Weimer -
Frank Bulk -
George William Herbert -
HRH Sven Olaf Prinz von CyberBunker-Kamphuis MP -
James Jun -
Joe Greco -
Justin M. Streiner -
Lamar Owen -
Larry Sheldon -
Marc Farnum Rendino -
Marshall Eubanks -
Matthew Kaufman -
Matthew Moyle-Croft -
Matthew Petach -
Michael Thomas -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Patrick Giagnocavo -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Randy Bush -
Randy Epstein -
Rod Beck -
Seth Mattinen -
William Warren