Thank you Vladis for pointing out that untidy detail .. :) Best Regards, Roderick.

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:43:46 EDT, Jim Popovitch said:

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On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 10:27 -0400, Roderick S. Beck wrote:

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So none of the customers on that well known system have any ring protection at this point nor will they during the next two weeks.

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Isn't that the way a ring works? Sounds like everything is working as designed.

Right. When one side got chomped by a turbo-shark or whatever got it, the other side took over. And until they fix the first side, any failure on the other side will mean it will fail over to the *other* other side.

Oh, there *is* no "*other* other side"? That must be what Roderick meant.. ;)

Roderick S. Beck. Global Wholesale Bandwidth, LLC Manhattan & Paris email: info@globalwholesalebandwidth.com New York Landline: 212-942-3345 Paris Landline: 33-1-4346-3209 GSM Wireless: 1-212-444-8829 This e-mail and any attachment thereto may contain information which is confidential and/or protected by intellectual property rights and are intended for the sole use of the recipient(s) named above. Any use of the information contained herein (including, but not limited to, total or partial reproduction, communication or distribution in any form) by other persons than the designated recipient(s) is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender either by telephone or by e-mail and delete the material from any computer.

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

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On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 10:27 -0400, Roderick S. Beck wrote:

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So none of the customers on that well known system have any ring protection at this point nor will they during the next two weeks.

[...]

Oh, there *is* no "*other* other side"? That must be what Roderick meant.. ;)

This strikes me as much ado about nothing. Mr. Beck (apparently a cable sales person, probably for the cable he says doesn't share the vulnerabilities) started this out by dismissing a cut that caused actual outages in an apparently less important part of the world, telling us that the "real news" is that one side of a redundant transatlantic ring was broken, leaving customers relying on the other side. He has then continued to post and post and post on the subject. Redundancy is a statistical game, a bet that some number of pieces won't all break at the same time. With a single point of failure, it's pretty likely that at some point you'll have an outage. As long as those outages are relatively rare and short, adding a second path makes it significantly less likely that both will break at once, but there's still some chance. Adding additional paths reduces the probability of simultaneous failure further, but never to zero. As you add more paths, you reach a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly. You also add complexity, which can cause its own problems. If it takes two weeks to repair a broken cable, carriers need to do a cost-benefit analysis. With a single cable, what are the chances of that cable breaking, and how much will it cost them to be down for two weeks, as compared the cost (including complexity) of a second path? With two paths, what are the chances that the second one will break during the same period that the first one is broken, how much will the resulting outage cost, and how does that risk compare to the cost of a third path? Presumably, most of the carriers are doing this analysis already. If their customers are sufficiently concerned, they're presumably doing such an analysis of their own. If any aren't, perhaps they should think about it, but whether doing that analysis will have them running out to buy an additional path across the Atlantic is far from clear. -Steve

Tell that to the 10 gig wave customers who lost service. Very few cable systems provide protection at the 10 gig wave level.

But surely you knew that going into the deal and did something about it? Neil.

Roderick, are you actually fishing and / or hoping for comments and mails directly to you to then tell your story and sell some? You throw so many pieces in here and there, it sounds like advertising, like your daily promotional verses all in one email thread. Despite your comments being all so innocent, this is not isp-bandwidth... So at the minimum make your role clear for everyone, and play with open cards. And save yourself the .sig and the disclaimer please... Thanks, Alexander On Fri, 22 June 2007 12:07:06 -0400, Roderick S. Beck wrote:

You would be surprised at how many don't split their traffic among several cable systems or if they do split, do due diligence on the terrestrial backhaul that most of these cables share on the US and UK sides.

There is lot of cost pressure in the IP market and it is very tempting to give all the business to one system in order to maximize cost savings.

And even those players who do split their traffic among the 7 major TransAtlantic cables, many are not aware that six of those systems share the conduit coming off the UK beaches. Six cables in one duct ...

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Tell that to the 10 gig wave customers who lost service. Very few cable systems provide protection at the 10 gig wave level.

But surely you knew that going into the deal and did something about it?

Neil.

Roderick S. Beck. Global Wholesale Bandwidth, LLC Manhattan & Paris email: info@globalwholesalebandwidth.com New York Landline: 212-942-3345 Paris Landline: 33-1-4346-3209 GSM Wireless: 1-212-444-8829

This e-mail and any attachment thereto may contain information which is confidential and/or protected by intellectual property rights and are intended for the sole use of the recipient(s) named above. Any use of the information contained herein (including, but not limited to, total or partial reproduction, communication or distribution in any form) by other persons than the designated recipient(s) is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender either by telephone or by e-mail and delete the material from any computer.

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

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Tell that to the 10 gig wave customers who lost service. Very few cable systems provide protection at the 10 gig wave level.

If you don't pay the extra amount for a protected circuit, why should your circuit get protection for free when others have to pay for it? Now, if there are 10G customers with protected circuits who lost service, then hopefully they have in their contract hefty penalty clauses against the carrier. If not, then they are just plain stupid.

Is paying for "protected circuits" actually worth it. Or are you better off just buying two circuits and using both during normal conditions. Use switching at layer 3 to the remaining circuit during abnormal conditions. Most of the time, you get twice the capacity for only twice the price instead of a "protected circuit" where you only get the once the capacity for twice the price. Of course, there is still the problem some facility provider will "groom" both your circuits on to the same cable. If you are buying pre-emptable circuits, hopefully you understand what that means.

In a message written on Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 11:56:32AM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:

Is paying for "protected circuits" actually worth it. Or are you better off just buying two circuits and using both during normal conditions. Use switching at layer 3 to the remaining circuit during abnormal conditions. Most of the time, you get twice the capacity for only twice the price instead of a "protected circuit" where you only get the once the capacity for twice the price.

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. I do happen to believe rather than get a single SONET/WDM protected 10G Wave you are better off getting two unprotected 10G waves and plugging them into your devices, and let layer 3 routing take over. It generally saves a good bit of cost, and it helps you keep the cable system honest. You know when there is an outage, no way to hide it from you. However, if you put 15G down your "20G" path, you have no redundancy. In a cut, dropping 5G on the floor, causing 33% packet loss is not "up", it might as well be down. If your redundancy solution is at Layer 3, you have to have the policies in place that you don't run much over 10G across your dual 10G links or you're back to effectively giving up all redundancy. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org

Leo Bicknell wrote:

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. I do happen to believe rather than get a single SONET/WDM protected 10G Wave you are better off getting two unprotected 10G waves and plugging them into your devices, and let layer 3 routing take over. It generally saves a good bit of cost, and it helps you keep the cable system honest. You know when there is an outage, no way to hide it from you.

That really depends. Two unprotected circuits are going to cost you twice as much. Typically if you're paying for protection, you're not getting two wavelengths, you're just getting electronics protection in the providers network; unless you've purchased the circuit "route diverse" on separate fiber paths. Protected in some networks doesn't always mean "route diverse".

However, if you put 15G down your "20G" path, you have no redundancy. In a cut, dropping 5G on the floor, causing 33% packet loss is not "up", it might as well be down.

I don't know if that's always true. Case in point 802.17. It runs active-active in unprotected space. While you have the extra bandwidth and classes of service, a cut doesn't really mean you're hard down, it all depends on the SLA's you provide to customers. Of course anything over the guaranteed bandwidth during failure would be classed only as "best effort". -- Robert Blayzor INOC rblayzor@inoc.net http://www.inoc.net/~rblayzor/ If you unplug it fast enough, anything is hot swappable!

Chris L. Morrow wrote:

Then there's the interesting: "How do you classify 'to be dropped' traffic?" Simon suggests nntp or BitTorrent could be put into a lower class queue, I'm curious as to how you'd classify traffic which is port-agile such as BitTorrent though. In theory that sounds like a grand plan, in practice it isn't simple...

It really depends on the network. Not all networks are the same. Case in point we have some network that carries a lot of video. Obviously we want all the channels to get from point A to point B, but there are services that really can be classed as "best effort"; like the VOD stuff. In most cases if VOD becomes unavailable, "so what". You can always watch it later when it's available again. Of course you want those types of services to always be available, but sometimes spending the $$$ to make that kind of thing four or five nines isn't built into the business case. -- Robert Blayzor INOC rblayzor@inoc.net http://www.inoc.net/~rblayzor/ YOUR PC's broken and I'VE got a problem? -- The BOFH Slogan

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007, Chris L. Morrow wrote:

I suppose if you had some special traffic you could qos up that and down everything else but that wasn't quite what Simon was getting at I don't think.

Although we may think IP is everything, Internet traffic is not the only type of traffice carried by telecommunication transmission systems. If you take the entire cable system from a transmission engineer's point of view, it looks different than from an IP engineer's point of view. Remember last year during the earthquake near Tawain, air traffic control and pstn voice capacity came back faster than Internet capacity. Convergence isn't all its cracked up to be.

Then there's the interesting: "How do you classify 'to be dropped' traffic?" Simon suggests nntp or BitTorrent could be put into a lower class queue, I'm curious as to how you'd classify traffic which is port-agile such as BitTorrent though. In theory that sounds like a grand plan, in practice it isn't simple...

Known "high priority" traffic could just be QoSed++ and everything else left to best-effort (or, more aptly, no effort). As Chris mentions, if you know the endpoints, or side, or protocol, or ports, that is pretty easy to decide. Your "everything else" bucket can be anything you haven't specifically decided is elevated priority. Port agile, but otherwise low-priority traffic, may or may not be adjusted, but my guess is that *enough* of the v. large number of strange port:strange port pairings will drop into the "everything else" bucket for the duration of your degraded service event. And in normal operation, with ample capacity, nothing really changes. Deepak Jain AiNET

Sean Donelan wrote:

Is paying for "protected circuits" actually worth it. Or are you better off just buying two circuits and using both during normal conditions. Use switching at layer 3 to the remaining circuit during abnormal conditions. Most of the time, you get twice the capacity for only twice the price instead of a "protected circuit" where you only get the once the capacity for twice the price.

I think it's pretty much safe to say that on a 10G wavelength, buying it as protected on the same fiber route, same glass path is a total waste of money. (at least for a trans-Atlantic circuit). That's some seriously expensive electronics protection. For that cost, it'd be cheaper to hire people to sit and at the box to replace cards when/if something happens electronically. ;-) -- Robert Blayzor INOC rblayzor@inoc.net http://www.inoc.net/~rblayzor/ If you unplug it fast enough, anything is hot swappable!

Yes, since most cables have multiple IP backbones on them, and this one has only one ...

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This cable system is also a major IP backbone player.

So it shouldn't be too hard to guess their identity.

You think?

Roderick S. Beck. Global Wholesale Bandwidth, LLC Manhattan & Paris email: info@globalwholesalebandwidth.com New York Landline: 212-942-3345 Paris Landline: 33-1-4346-3209 GSM Wireless: 1-212-444-8829 This e-mail and any attachment thereto may contain information which is confidential and/or protected by intellectual property rights and are intended for the sole use of the recipient(s) named above. Any use of the information contained herein (including, but not limited to, total or partial reproduction, communication or distribution in any form) by other persons than the designated recipient(s) is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender either by telephone or by e-mail and delete the material from any computer.