Backbone routes cannot be concealed. How could they be? Prior to any plow ever hitting the ground or strand strung between poles there are (sometimes very lengthy) environmental impact assessments, permits issued, RFPs/RFQs and awards to have the work done, USGS surveys, ROW franchises issued, and more, that are all a matter of public record. Not to mention the hoards of gawkers lined up along roadsides supervising trenchers as they tear apart the countryside laying down conduit. The routes themselves cannot be concealed, but the tenants who reside in the conduits, and those who piggy-back atop primary providers, often can. --------- This tidbit concerning Sean's work and other documents regarding location was posted to my forum on Silicon Investor. You may find it of interest: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=19094753 Frank Coluccio DTI Consulting Inc. frank@fttx.org -----Original Message----- From: Michael.Dillon@radianz.com Sent: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 10:13:40 +0100 To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Backbone Infrastructure and Secrecy

Are we going to throw a burlap sack over 60 Hudson, the Westin Building, One Wilshire, or similar buildings and disavow knowledge of their existence? You can't hide major infrastructure.

Yes. However we can work to spread out the infrastructure more so that it is harder for terrorists to find a single point of failure to attack. If they have to coordinate an attack on 3 or 4 locations, there is an increased probability that something will go wrong (as on 9/11) and one or more of their targets will escape total destruction. We all need to find ways to make our networks more resilient even if that means moving away from "comfortable" vendors like Cisco and Juniper. The costs of resilience are not immovable objects. Those costs arise because the routers and circuits we would use to implement resilience are the same things we use to carry paying traffic and the vendors price their products based on the expectation that we use them for paying traffic. Since the vendors can't tell whether or not the router/circuit earns revenue for us, they won't give up their margin on the sale. In both cases, the underlying components of the product are virtual commodities (fiber, wavelengths, circuit boards, chips) and are continually dropping in price. Perhaps it will require government regulations regarding diversity and resilience to change this but wouldn't it be nice if the industry could get together and solve this problem in a self-regulatory fashion? --Michael Dillon