On Tue, 21 Aug 2007, Adrian Chadd wrote:

Or there might suddenly be a reason/market for properly physically diverse paths which provide partial 1:1 (ie, some services are guaranteed full backup bandwidth, other services get degraded access) IP paths..

I don't think the target customer in this case is really in the market for properly physically diverse paths which provide partial 1:1. The target customer seems to be looking for no-frills, cheap Internet. Customers in a market for properly physically diverse paths with partial 1:1 probably are already buying Internet from other ISPs. There is no minimum Internet SLA that all ISPs must meet. ISPs can be as bad as someone in the marketplace is willing to buy.

On Aug 21, 2007, at 12:55 PM, David Lesher wrote:

Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:

...

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007, Adrian Chadd wrote:

...

Or there might suddenly be a reason/market for properly physically diverse paths which provide partial 1:1 (ie, some services are guaranteed full backup bandwidth, other services get degraded access) IP paths..

I don't think the target customer in this case is really in the market for properly physically diverse paths which provide partial 1:1. The target customer seems to be looking for no-frills, cheap Internet.

Customers in a market for properly physically diverse paths with partial 1:1 probably are already buying Internet from other ISPs.

And still not getting it. A friend oversees various expensive USG networks. They pay for physically diverse routing from multiple sources. Yet every year, when they do an laborious audit down to the "what fiber, in what bundle, in what trench" level; they find..

Guess What! Yep, someone has moved this circuit or that one to where both pipes are intimate neighbors.

My rule is that you never really know where bits are actually going unless you put in the fiber yourself. (Of course, you can know where the bits _went_, once the backhoe or the train crash takes out your circuit, but by an extension of the quantum measurement theory, that only applies to the past, not the future.)

It's inevitable given buying throughput is rather like moving something by ship. You never go to the ship [fiber] owner; you go to a freight broker who deals with a consolidator who calls an agent who knows who has chartered ships from A to B on DATE and.... [Look up the "GTS Katie" incident for a side effect of this.]

Yes, and likewise you never know how your (literal) shipment is going until you get it. (Vienna, Austria, to Norfolk, Virginia, with a stage by truck from St Louis, Missouri ? Happened to me. They must have been using some sort of hot potato routing.) Totally OT, but it made me really happy to learn that Dulles Airport is officially a port, and I can literally send things by ship to IAD for customs clearance and pickup for the same price as to Norfolk, Virginia (an actual port, with docks and water and ships and all that). Of course, I don't have to care about their routing protocols or their last mile problems. Regards Marshall

-- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

Pardon my forwardness, but don't people just multi-home these days? If your network connection is that mission critical, then having at least two providers would be prudent. Keep Cogent for el cheapo/variable latency connection, but have a reliable second and/or third source (i.e. Sprint, UUNET/Verizon). All of these issues have convinced me to multihome with Sprint as soon as my fiber-to-the-home-business is finished. Granted I still have a single point of failure with the single fiber into my cable co (which will allow me to multi-home with Sprint and cable co TWC, ASN 20001) but the crime rate in my area is MUCH lower in the last mile. Much less chance of gunfire taking it down. I am more worried about that critical path in Cleveland; hopefully Sprint and Level3/ATDN (TWC multihomed providers) keep their fiber buried more deeply in high crime/railroad areas... -- This mail was scanned by BitDefender For more informations please visit http://www.bitdefender.com

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Andy Davidson wrote:

Is it not possible to require that each of your suppliers provide over a specified path ? I'm planning a build-out that will require a diverse path between two points, and one supplier has named two routes, and promised that they wont change for the duration of the contract. Perhaps I am naive, but a promise should be a promise.

Note: IANAL, nor do I play one on TV. Spell out exactly what you want (read: make no assumptions about even the most mundane details) when talking to your account rep and go over the contract and accompanying schedules with a fine-toothed comb before you sign. You want to make sure all those details are spelled out the same way that you provided them to your salescritter and also check for legalese that gives the provider room to do things like re-groom your circuit/lamdba/whatever you're buying onto another (possibly convergent) path without your notification and consent. Even then, be prepared to take your provider(s) to task and perform due diligence on those physical routes on a regular basis. Note that getting this information in the first place may require you to execute a non- disclosure agreement. Check the wording of that agreement as well to make sure that it won't prevent you from a) performing future due diligence and b) seeking legal relief if a future round of due diligence shows that the terms of your contract have been breached. jms

I agree with this, and many people take the Ts & Cs, MSA, etc the vendor anyway. We have a standing habit of reading over our new contracts with our attorney on a con call, we always edit them, send them back to the vendor and negotiate on any changes. Its amazing how much you can get things changed in your favor if you're persistent. More on point for this thread, I always have new vendors bring in fiber maps and show me their paths. Images of the intended path specified on the map are part of the contract, including verbage regarding failover paths. Once I know where their fiber is, I can look for another vendor that takes a different path. Some locations are easier than others of course. A lot depends on what the motto is as to where they like to run fiber, or who they lease/bought their fiber from. What I find hard to combat are M&A changing operations over time, overlooking contractual obligations on the vendor's part usually. This is a reason we always use 12 mo terms, we can change things fast enough to beat their changing things for us. Sometimes we even go back to the same vendor, just to make sure the new company and contract detail what we have and where it goes. Sounds a little tedious, but at least you know where your circuits go. Sean Donelan wrote:

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Andy Davidson wrote:

...

Is it not possible to require that each of your suppliers provide over a specified path ? I'm planning a build-out that will require a diverse path between two points, and one supplier has named two routes, and promised that they wont change for the duration of the contract. Perhaps I am naive, but a promise should be a promise.

Just naive. Most people make assumptions about what was promised. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. What the sales person promises, the fine print takes away.

http://www.atis.org/ndai/ATIS_NDAI_Final_Report_2006.pdf

You will find out no one will sell to you if the contract requires some things, and the alternatives are rather limited.

I would be more concerned about suppliers that promise things that aren't possible than suppliers that decline to sell things that aren't possible. Unrealastic buyers are just as much of a problem as non-performance by sellers.

If anyone promises their network will never do down, they will never have single paths, they are perfect; you should grab your wallet and run away.

On 8/26/07, Jason LeBlanc <jml@packetpimp.org> wrote:

More on point for this thread, I always have new vendors bring in fiber maps and show me their paths. Images of the intended path specified on the map are part of the contract, including verbage regarding failover paths. Once I know where their fiber is, I can look for another vendor that takes a different path.

From a technology standpoint, a lot of carriers are starting to use intelligent optical switches

This often won't get you the most cost-effective connections, and sometimes it'll be bad for performance as well, and doesn't always take advantage of available technology. For instance, if Carrier 1 and Carrier 2 both use the same route for their primary connection, and you buy from Carrier 1 because they're 5% cheaper, you may find that Carrier 2's second-best route is a lot more expensive that Carrier 1's. If you're buying from two carriers to get equipment diversity as well as route diversity, you've lost. Another kind of problem I've run into in the past - here in California, to get from SF to LA, you can either go down the coast or down the Central Valley, depending on which railroads or highways you like. But there's another route that takes a railroad connection from SLO (middle of the coast) to Bakersfield (south/middle of the valley), and if your primary connection uses that route, the options for diverse routes go through Salt Lake City or Denver. Given the history of what fiber got built when, you'll find that for some speeds many of the carriers use that crossover route, while for lower speeds there's a lot more choice. that give them automated provisioning, automatic reroutes, etc., so while they can show you where their cable routes are, and where the most likely provisioning and reroutes go, in general you can't get a precise guaranteed route, because that's not what the switches do.

What I find hard to combat are M&A changing operations over time, In general, it's hard for one carrier to keep track of diversity (though some can), and much much harder for two carriers to keep diverse from each other. And the tracking problems scale differently for large connections, where you may build custom access rings, than for small connections where most providers are reselling telco last-mile copper.

There's also the problem of diversity philosophy - it's not uncommon for large East-Coast companies to view equipment diversity as the critical problem, and concentrate their switches into a smaller number of larger sites where they can do cost-effective sparing, and have their fiber spread out across many different physical routes, not remembering that customers in the West Coast expect that buildings just fall down sometimes, so they care about building diversity, and geographical and demographic considerations mean that there are only a few good routes across the Rockies and along the coasts. (Of course, sometimes this means that the West Coast customers buy from multiple carriers to get building diversity and _still_ get caught when a telco DACS fails :-) .... ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.

Deepak Jain wrote:

I guess there will probably be a spec for armored OSP cable now. I just thought it was cool indoors. I never realized Cleveland was so dangerous to telecommunications equipment. :_)

DJ

I've always figured that Cleveland was dangerous, period. -- Jeff Shultz