My experience is that a lot of the BB providers route through NAPs/MAEs when they have local peering. The Internet IS more brittle than it needs to be, because routing seems to be a lot more static than it should be.
> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Steve Gibbard > Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 12:39 PM > To: nanog@merit.edu > Subject: Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest > (Qatar to UAE) > > > On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Kee Hinckley wrote: > > > Which leads me to my operational question. > > > > If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do > > you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect > an oceanic > > cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less > > discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A > non-physical solution > > involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? > > The other answer is to be less dependent on the cables. > > Some communications need to be long distance -- talking to a > specific person in a far away place, setting up import/export > deals, calling tech support -- but a lot don't. E-mailing or > VOIP calling your neighbors, looking at web sites for local > businesses, reading your local newspaper or accessing other > local content, or telecommuting across town, all ought to be > able to be done locally, without dependence on international > infrastructure. Yet we keep seeing articles about outages of > "Internet and long distance telephone" networks, implying > that this Internet thing we've all been working on is pretty > fragile compared to the old fashioned phone networks we've > been trying to replace. > > The report from Renesys > (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/mediterranean_cable_break > _part.shtml) > looks at outages in connectivity to India, Pakistan, Saudi > Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. I'll assume that those areas > probably did keep some local connectivity. India has its > NIXI exchanges, although my understanding is that they're not > as well used as one might hope. Saudi Arabia has a monopoly > international transit provider, which should have the effect > of keeping local traffic local. Egypt has an exchange point. > I don't know about Pakistan or Kuwait. Unfortunately, > little else works without DNS. > Pakistan and India have DNS root servers, but Pakistan's .PK > ccTLD is served entirely from the US. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, > and Egypt all have servers for their local ccTLDs, but do not > have local root DNS servers. > Of that list, only India has both the root and their ccTLD > hosted locally. > > And then there's the rest of the services people use. Being > able to get to DNS doesn't help people talk to their > neighbors if both they and their neighbors are using mail > services in far away places, for instance. > > -Steve >