Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[JC Dill]

Alex Rubenstein wrote:


Further, the internet has always been a best-effort medium.


Can someone please explain how Level 3 is making a "best effort" to 
connect their customers to Cogent's customers?


Various people have stated that uneven data flows (e.g. from 
mostly-content networks to mostly-eyeball networks) is a good reason to 
not peer.  I'd love to know how it improves Level 3's network to have 
data from Cogent arrive over some *other* connection rather than 
directly from a peering connection.  Do they suddenly, magically, no 
longer have backhaul that mostly-content data across their own backbone 
to their users who have requested it if it should come in from one of 
their *other* peers who (in normal peering fashion) hot-potato hands it 
off to them at the first opportunity, rather than coming in directly 
from Cogent?


I don't think so.

So why break off peering???

AFAICT there's only one reason to break off peering, and it's to force 
Cogent to pay (anyone) to transit the data.  Why does L3 care if Cogent 
sends the data for free via peering, or pays someone ELSE to transit the 
data?


I think this is about a big bully trying to force a smaller player off 
of the big guys' playing field (tier 1 peering).  From where I sit it 
looks like an anti-competitive move that is not a "best effort" to serve 
their customers but a specific effort to put another (smaller) 
competitor out of business (of being a transit-free or mostly 
transit-free backbone) by forcing them to pay (someone), forcing their 
costs up.  Level 3 must know they are no longer putting for a "best 
effort" for their own customers to connect them to the "internet" (as 
their customers see it, the "complete internet" that their customers 
have come to expect).


I Am Not A Lawyer.  (duh?)

IMHO all L3 customers have a valid argument that Level 3 is in default 
of any service contract that calls for "best effort" or similar on L3's 
part.


I also believe that Cogent has a valid argument that Level 3's behavior 
is anti-competitive in a market where the tier 1 networks *collectively* 
have a 100% complete monopoly on the business of offering transit-free 
backbone internet services.  As such, L3's behavior might fall into 
anti-trust territory - because if Cogent caves in over this and buys 
transit for the traffic destined for L3 then what's to stop the rest of 
the tier 1 guys from following suit and forcing Cogent to buy transit to 
get to *all* tier 1 networks?  Then who will they (TINT) force out next?


What's to stop a big government (like the US) from stepping in and 
attempting to regulate peering agreements, using the argument that 
internet access is too important to allow individual networks to bully 
other networks out of the market - at the expense of customers - and 
ultimately resulting in less competition and higher rates?  Is this type 
of regulation good for the internet?  OTOH is market consolidation good 
for the internet?


I don't like this slippery slope, I don't like it one little bit.

jc

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 7, 2005, at 1:17 AM, Silver Tiger wrote:

Provider A has host/service/user traffic that we will call "Blue  
Bricks"

that need to be moved outside their network.
Provider B has host/service/user traffic that we will call "Red  
Bricks" that

need to be moved outside their network..

Both providers decide to meet at the corner and exchange 1 brick  
each on a

regular basis

let's say for 1000 cycles both providers meet and exchange blocks
successfully.

for the next 200 cycles Provider A brings his expected "blue brick"  
to the

corner, yet provider B brings two "red bricks".
While that was not expected .. it is acceptable in the short term.

then as time goes by Provider B begins to bring additional blocks,  
yet seems

not to notice the standard 1 block that provider A is bringing.

While fairly simple, this model explains that the disproportion of  
"blocks",

or traffic as it were, could be a cause of distress.


It does not.

You have forgotten that provider A's customers are asking to get  
those blue bricks.  Is he supposed to stop providing this customers  
the desired bricks just 'cause he doesn't have enough bricks to get  
Provider B?


You also forgot that Providers A & B aren't meeting on a street  
corner.  They're meeting on opposite ends of the continent, or even  
the planet.  Provider A might be carrying those blue bricks a LOT  
further than Provider B is.  Now we have a problem 'cause weight  
times distance equals backache.


You also forgot that Providers A & B have to pay cab fare to get to  
those geographically dispersed corners.  One might have to take the  
cab a lot longer than the other, incurring more time & money.


You also forgot ... well, about 14 other things.

--
TTFN,
patrick

RE: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Silver Tiger]

Benson  Schliesser wrote:>Michael Dillon wrote:>> P.S. would the Internet be worse off if all traffic >.> exchange was paid for and there was no settlement>> free interconnect at all? 
I.e. paid peering, paid>> full transit and paid partial transit on the menu?>Would you care to speculate on which party receives the greater benefit:>the sender of bytes, or the receiver of bytes?

>If both the sender and receiver are being billed for the traffic by>their respective (different) service providers (all other issues being>equal) is one provider in a better position than the other?

>Cheers,>-Benson
Having enable on a router, yet not having experience with peering in any capacity I was wondering if this analogy holds water.
Please excuse the simple model, as I want to understand what other factors may be involved (aside from contractual nuances)
Provider A has host/service/user traffic that we will call "Blue Bricks" that need to be moved outside their network.Provider B has host/service/user traffic that we will call "Red Bricks" that need to be moved outside their network..

Both providers decide to meet at the corner and exchange 1 brick each on a regular basis
let's say for 1000 cycles both providers meet and exchange blocks successfully.
for the next 200 cycles Provider A brings his expected "blue brick" to the corner, yet provider B brings two "red bricks".While that was not expected .. it is acceptable in the short term.
then as time goes by Provider B begins to bring additional blocks, yet seems not to notice the standard 1 block that provider A is bringing.
While fairly simple, this model explains that the disproportion of "blocks", or traffic as it were,  could be a cause of distress.
While I hear talk of "Price compression" and "lining pockets" respectively from those who have chosen their position, based on what I've read here and in other places, depeering is a non aggressive yet detrimental way to assert the concerns of a peering provider who feels that the relationship has become inequitable.  I can see how the costs of arranging peering and maintaining it can be quite sizable on both sides, but what other factors could cause this type of depeering. Perhaps my view is over simplified, but I don't see this as a black and white "bad guy" scenario. As previous posts have (whether accurately or not) stated, Cogent was notified in advance of Level 3's intentions and both companies had to know that they were shooting themselves in the foot by playing this ever frustrating game of "chicken".

I welcome flames/education as this can't be as much of a dichotomy as it seems to be
ST

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 8:32 PM, Niels Bakker wrote:


* [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Deepak Jain) [Fri 07 Oct 2005, 02:29 CEST]:

I think Cogent's offer of providing free transit to all single  
homed Level3 customers is particularly clever and being  
underpublicized. I wouldn't be surprised if Cogent is in more  
buildings than Level3 with a high degree of overlap with the  
entire Level3 lit network. That could be a very nasty "competitor"  
to force into your customers awareness by your own action (or  
inaction) -- especially if your customer is single homed to you  
and realizes now that isn't enough of the "Internet" for them.


I guess a significant part of the single-homed networks behind Level 
(3) would be in PA space owned by them, and thus will find the  
initial step towards multihoming very hard to take (renumbering  
into PI or their own PA space).


Renumber why?

If they have a /24, all they need is an AS & a BGP capable router.

If they don't have a /24 or larger, then they will either need to  
renumber, or NAT, or some other fun magic.  But the upper bound on  
the difficult of such exercises is exactly equal to changing providers.


--
TTFN,
patrick

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Joe Abley]

On 6-Oct-2005, at 19:38, Schliesser, Benson wrote:


Customers don't want to pay for a "stochastic set of relationships",
they will pay for the "Internet" however.


What is "Internet"? Let's channel Seth Breidbart briefly and call it  
the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric  
closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP packet from". It  
should be clear that the nature and extent of this network depends  
very much on the perspective of the connected device from which is it  
measured.



It's like paying for a telephone that could only call a subset of the
world's telephone users.


... which is precisely what every telephone service you can buy in  
the world gives you, to varying degrees.


Do people in Spain complain that they can't call numbers starting  
with +350, and insist on getting money back from their monthly bill?  
Or do they accept that their government has an ongoing dispute with  
the UK over whether Gibraltar is in fact part of Spain?



Joe

Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Steven M. Bellovin]

Probably the most authoritative statement out there is at
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/23/msg00081.html
I quote:

  >>So the motivation for Paul's work was to provide a minimal but highly
  >>survivable one-way communications arrangement to get out the go-code; it was
  >>NOT motivated by a requirement for a survivable command-control system that
  >>could support the forces fully in both peace and in war.

That's from Willis Ware, who was in the management structure at RAND at 
the time.

But Baran's own attitude is a bit different.  Here's quote from
Abbate's "Inventing the Internet":

on page 1 of the introduction to his 1960 paper describing
a survivable communications system Baran explicitly
characterized his proposed network as a tool for recovering
from?rather than forestalling?a nuclear war: "The cloud-of-doom
attitude that nuclear war spells the end of the earth is
slowly lifting from the minds of the many?. It follows that
we should?do all those things necessary to permit the
survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and
reconstruct the economy swiftly."

The cited paper is Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using
Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes. Report P-1995, Rand Corporation;
I haven't been able to find it online.


--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Deepak Jain]

I guess a significant part of the single-homed networks behind Level(3) 
would be in PA space owned by them, and thus will find the initial step 
towards multihoming very hard to take (renumbering into PI or their own 
PA space).




Its absolutely a high bar. It is no higher than changing providers which 
I would probably advocate to anyone who asked my opinion who was single 
homed. However the "to-whom" question looms larger and larger. The list 
of transit-free providers that have not forcibly depeered another 
network is growing short indeed.


If Cogent were looking for an opportunity as a solution provider, they 
could provide PBR route-maps and the following suggestions:


If you are an enterprise customer, many services like your main DNS 
servers, web server, etc. could gain IPs in both spaces and you could 
set up a proxy that can tell one space from another and reach both spaces.


This would solve many of the access provider and webhosting provider 
problems out there. The ones that would stay broken are specialized 
applications and websites that are highly sensitive to proxies, etc.


But as as a community, I think NANOGers would agree... something that 
smells like connectivity is still better than none.


Deepak

musings ....

[bmanning]

on peering, transit, and why Vadim should be flogged... :)

Vadim (i think) frist coined the term Tier-N for classifying ISPs.  Nice 
marketing term.

wrt peering, tranist, and the relative importance of communications channels...

) the PSTN is not ubiquitious ... it is NOT possible to dial and be 
connected to
  every known telephone number from every/any possible number. 
Goverments do
  block access to some other places they find objectionable.
) "the Internet" is and (nearly) always has been a collection of 
networks, the 
  interconnection of which is bound by policies.  those policies are 
there to
  restrict/interdict/block traffic of one form or another. (how many of 
you 
  -want- BGP w/o the policy knobs?)
) if communications w/ someone or some entity is critical, it behoves 
me to 
  ensure that such channels are available.  that may entail me owning 
the ROW,
  the transmission media, and the CPE at each end.  Or, for less 
critical 
  channels, I might be able to aquire such services from suppliers. For 
even 
  less critical communications, I might even presume that my suppliers 
and 
  their various associates and fellow travelers in the IP pipe business 
will
  get my various bits to the random places that I try to send them to 
on a whim.
  And... that the other bits will get back to me. :)

don't want to talk about content.  :(

--bill (who has enable, has negotiated peering and transit, and is dumbfounded 
at the length of this thread)

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Niels Bakker]

* [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Deepak Jain) [Fri 07 Oct 2005, 02:29 CEST]:
I think Cogent's offer of providing free transit to all single homed 
Level3 customers is particularly clever and being underpublicized. I 
wouldn't be surprised if Cogent is in more buildings than Level3 with a 
high degree of overlap with the entire Level3 lit network. That could be 
a very nasty "competitor" to force into your customers awareness by your 
own action (or inaction) -- especially if your customer is single homed 
to you and realizes now that isn't enough of the "Internet" for them.


I guess a significant part of the single-homed networks behind Level(3) 
would be in PA space owned by them, and thus will find the initial step 
towards multihoming very hard to take (renumbering into PI or their own 
PA space).



-- Niels.

--
"Calling religion a drug is an insult to drugs everywhere. 
Religion is more like the placebo of the masses."

-- MeFi user boaz

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Deepak Jain]

If you don't have enable on a router, and you've never negotiated
peering with a transit free ISP then you're not qualified to comment.
You really don't understand what's going on here, and it's not, I
repeat, not a technical problem.  There is nothing wrong with the
technology, architecture, or anything else.  There is something
wrong with the business model of one, or both of these companies.


I agree. Though many of the people who meet the second criteria don't 
even have enable anymore. :)


That said, the business relationships that have evolved have certainly
overwhelmed -- or rather use a very specific definition of 
connectivity/reachability, etc. When two transit free networks peer, its
often in many locations over many different political regions (time 
zones, geographies, pick your term). Deliberately and voluntarily taking 
that down does not change the stability of the underlying architecture.


Certainly anyone who runs any network of any size knows very well that 
the Internet does not survive conscience, deliberate breakage well at 
all -- nor was it architected to. Put a little knowledge into a border 
router that is a part of the "Internet" and watch the chaos you can create.


Further, the "survivability" we talk about also requires that the end 
nodes, clients, networks, ISPs design for fault-tolerance. This would 
imply no single-connections. Like all de-peerings, this creates the most 
hardship for those Enterprise customers (and smaller customers) that 
either don't have the know how to know they need multiple providers and 
portable space or the smaller customers that can't afford it [business 
model or actual finance]. Those of us who are customers of both networks 
or customers of neither network wouldn't even notice.


I think Cogent's offer of providing free transit to all single homed 
Level3 customers is particularly clever and being underpublicized. I 
wouldn't be surprised if Cogent is in more buildings than Level3 with a 
high degree of overlap with the entire Level3 lit network. That could be 
a very nasty "competitor" to force into your customers awareness by your
own action (or inaction) -- especially if your customer is single homed 
to you and realizes now that isn't enough of the "Internet" for them.


Deepak

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 06:36:00PM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> All philosophy aside, it does bother me that a simple single depeering can 
> cause such an uproar in a network supposedly immune to nuclear war (even 
> though the Internet was not designed from the start to survive nuclear war; 
> Paul Baran's packet-switching work aside; reference 'Where Wizards Stay Up 
> Late' which quotes Taylor and others on the origins of the ARPAnet portion of 
> the old Internet).  I shudder to think of what would happen if there were to 
> be a real problem (I mean, really, one link (out of many thousands) is down 
> and the Sky Is Falling!).  What happened to resiliency?

I've seen a lot of comments about the "disruption" caused by this
depeering event, and what would happen if $bad_thing happened.

I point you back a few weeks to when the hurricane hit.  You need
look no further to see people offering up their assistance to those
in need.  Look back further to 9-11, and people offering networking
help to those who's infrastructure was damaged.

I have no doubt that if the Level 3 / Cogent issue had been caused
by a pre-emptive nuclear strike and the nation was called to arms
that virtually every ISP that connects to both would be offering
them free transit to get them reconnected.

Indeed, I could log into my routers now and fix the Cogent / Level
3 problem with about 3 minutes of typing.  It would cost my company
thousands of dollars to do so, so I'm not going to do it.  As I
said before, right now this is a business problem.  By the same
token, if we were just attacked and Level 3 and Cogent were both,
together, asking for help I'd log in and have them working as fast
as I could type.  I bet others would as well.

Level 3 and Cogent are able to fix their own problems in this case,
either by making up, or by entering into a business relationship
with a third party to fix it.  This is also a problem that they,
themselves created.  That's the difference here.

I've got a new set of rules to add to this thread:

If you don't have enable on a router, and you've never negotiated
peering with a transit free ISP then you're not qualified to comment.
You really don't understand what's going on here, and it's not, I
repeat, not a technical problem.  There is nothing wrong with the
technology, architecture, or anything else.  There is something
wrong with the business model of one, or both of these companies.

-- 
   Leo Bicknell - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.tmbg.org


pgpYhJeDjKGD9.pgp
Description: PGP signature

RE: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Alex Rubenstein]

Customers don't want to pay for a "stochastic set of relationships",
they will pay for the "Internet" however.


Perhaps we have lied to the them?

The internet has always been a stochastic set of relationships -- some 
relationships of which are based upon two people getting drunk together at 
the right place, at the right time. Is anyone going to deny this?


Further, the internet has always been a best-effort medium. We, as xSP's, 
have done our best to make the 'best' in 'best effort' as good as we can, 
to varying levels of success.


The fact that the internet is hugely successful, and mostly reliable, is 
due to smart people and some level of luck. Not because someone peers with 
someone else.


It wasn't designed this way.



It's like paying for a telephone that could only call a subset of the


Please, for the love of god, do not make analogies to the phone network.



Call me crazy if you'd like, but I tend to think that peering on the
Internet is too important...


Do you think a thread which has made 100 posts on nanog, with people 
coming out of the woodwork who I haven't seen in years, is something that 
anyone things is not important?




--
Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, [EMAIL PROTECTED], latency, Al Reuben
Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net

RE: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Schliesser, Benson]

> I would think in NANOG that one would know the simple fact that 'The
Complete 
> Internet' is complete and utter fiction, and does not exist.  What
does exist 
> is a complex, dynamic, even stochastic set of relationships between 
> autonomous networks, who can pick and choose their relationships at
whim. 

Customers don't want to pay for a "stochastic set of relationships",
they will pay for the "Internet" however.

It's like paying for a telephone that could only call a subset of the
world's telephone users. And the solution (assuming you wanted global
reachability) was to buy multiple telephone services from different
providers, but even then the reachability that those providers offered
would change over time. Would you be happy to rely on telephone for
critical business (or other) functions?

Call me crazy if you'd like, but I tend to think that peering on the
Internet is too important...

-Benson


---
Benson Schliesser
(email) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

I barely understand my own thoughts, much worse those of my betters.
Thus, the opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my
employer. Ponder them at your own risk.

Re: Peering vs SFI (was Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Paul Vixie]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] ("Schliesser, Benson") writes:

> Would you care to speculate on which party receives the greater benefit:
> the sender of bytes, or the receiver of bytes?
> 
> If both the sender and receiver are being billed for the traffic by
> their respective (different) service providers (all other issues being
> equal) is one provider in a better position than the other?

If it's still common for one to be billed only for "highest of in vs. out"
then there's no way to compare the benefits since there's always a "shadow"
direction and it won't be symmetric among flow endpoints.
-- 
Paul Vixie

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Lamar Owen]

On Wednesday 05 October 2005 15:52, JC Dill wrote:
> Matthew Crocker wrote:
> > Ok,  I *pay* Cogent for 'Direct Internet Access' which is IP Transit
> > service.  I *cannot* get to part of the internet via Cogent right  now.
[snip]
> > *not* providing complete Internet access, I really don't  care who's
> > fault it is.

> Right now *neither* Cogent nor Level3 are providing complete Direct
> Internet Access.  This is a self-solving problem - why would anyone buy
> internet access (or renew existing contracts as they expire) from either
> of these networks when neither of them connect to the complete
> internet?[1]  

I would think in NANOG that one would know the simple fact that 'The Complete 
Internet' is complete and utter fiction, and does not exist.  What does exist 
is a complex, dynamic, even stochastic set of relationships between 
autonomous networks, who can pick and choose their relationships at whim.  We 
conveniently label this collection of relationships as 'The Internet' and 
erroneously treat it as an individual, which it is not.  Sometimes these 
individual networks are even antagonistic to each other; boo-hoo.  Cry me a 
river; they've done what they've done and most SLA's for transit don't cover 
traffic outside the transit network.  Take it up with your upstream, who will 
probably simply say it's not their problem (and it's not, unless your 
upstream is Cogent or Level3).  You cannot reach what doesn't exist, and the 
Compleat Internet does not exist.

All philosophy aside, it does bother me that a simple single depeering can 
cause such an uproar in a network supposedly immune to nuclear war (even 
though the Internet was not designed from the start to survive nuclear war; 
Paul Baran's packet-switching work aside; reference 'Where Wizards Stay Up 
Late' which quotes Taylor and others on the origins of the ARPAnet portion of 
the old Internet).  I shudder to think of what would happen if there were to 
be a real problem (I mean, really, one link (out of many thousands) is down 
and the Sky Is Falling!).  What happened to resiliency?

'Hold her steady, steady, Mr. Sulu.'
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

RE: Peering vs SFI (was Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Schliesser, Benson]

Michael Dillon wrote:
> P.S. would the Internet be worse off if all traffic 
> exchange was paid for and there was no settlement
> free interconnect at all? I.e. paid peering, paid
> full transit and paid partial transit on the menu?

Would you care to speculate on which party receives the greater benefit:
the sender of bytes, or the receiver of bytes?

If both the sender and receiver are being billed for the traffic by
their respective (different) service providers (all other issues being
equal) is one provider in a better position than the other?

Cheers,
-Benson

Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Steven Champeon wrote:



on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:


On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old
wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by

[...]

It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP


For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth.  I wasn't there,
but according to someone who was:

  


I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:

- some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build
  communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came
  up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through
  multiple redundant nodes


Read the paper here:

http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html

Redundant is probably the wrong word, failure-tolerant is probably more 
accurate.




- the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race

- a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications
  networks

- the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed
  network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing
  else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)


- the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack


Roughly modeled after something designed to continue to route packets 
following the loss of a few nodes.



QED, HTH, HAND




--
--
Joel Jaeggli   Unix Consulting [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2

MPLScon 2006 Call for Presentations

[Irwin Lazar]

Title: MPLScon 2006 Call for Presentations



The Call for Presentations for MPLScon 2006 is now available at http://www.mplscon.com/speaker/submit_pres.html

MPLScon 2006 takes place May 22-26 in New York City.  Please see the above web site for additional details or contact me with any questions regarding speaking at the event.

Irwin

-- 
Irwin Lazar, Conference Director, MPLScon
http://www.mplscon.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: 703-742-9659
AIM/iChat/Skype/Gizmo: imlazar

Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Steven Champeon]

on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> > > While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old 
> > > wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by 
> [...]
> > It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
> 
> For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth.  I wasn't there,
> but according to someone who was:
> 
>   

I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:

 - some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build
   communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came
   up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through 
   multiple redundant nodes

 - the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race

 - a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications
   networks

 - the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed
   network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing
   else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)

 - the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack

QED, HTH, HAND

-- 
hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com
antispam news, solutions for sendmail, exim, postfix: http://enemieslist.com/

Contracts (was: Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Deepak Jain]

There is another point here. For anyone signing contracts where the 
buyer has significant bargaining power with the seller, you can

specifically stipulate that connectivity to the seller's network is
not-good-enough to save them from paying an SLA event or indeed
breaching the contract. (What is good enough is left as an exercise to
the reader).

Sellers may wish to push that risk onto the buyer's, but if history
is any judge, buyer's are remiss in accepting that liability and risk 
without a significant financial incentive. (such as a huge discount

over prevailing rates).

Deepak

Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[John Kristoff]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> > While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old 
> > wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by 
[...]
> It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP

For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth.  I wasn't there,
but according to someone who was:

  

John

RE: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[David Schwartz]

> On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:27:24 PDT, David Schwartz said:

> > Level 3 cut of Cogent's connectivity. Until and unless they
> > give some
> > reason that makes sense, they are no longer making the effort
> > and are not
> > part of the internet.

> If I had a garden, things would grow *so* wonderfully next year
> if I spread this
> stuff on it.

> So are you saying that if *your* AS was peered at a dozen places, and you
> dropped *one* because it wasn't cost-effective, that you wouldn't
> be part of
> the Internet, even though you still had 11 peers going full blast?

Being part of the Internet is not about communicating with 11 people and
not the twelfth. It's about communicating with *anyone* (quite literally)
that's willing to make a sufficient effort to communicate with you using the
standards and practices that have evolved.

> By the same logic, Cogent isn't part of the Internet *EITHER*,
> because they're
> not bending over backwards to buy transit to get the L3 routes
> accessible again.

Bending over backwards was never required. As I said in the part you cut
off when you replied, nobody has to run a line all the way to the server in
my basement that isn't connectected to anything at all. What they do have to
do is make a reasonable effort to communicate with anyone who is willing to
make a similar effort. When you contract for Internet access, you are
contracting to reach everyone who wants to reach you. This "want" is not a
mental thing, it's an action of making the effort to connect to people.

> For that matter, AS1312 isn't part of the Internet either, because we're
> only connected at 2 major points at the moment, and we're not
> making much of
> an effort to get connectivity to places that for one reason or
> another don't
> see a routing announcement for us, or we don't see their
> announcement. And I'm
> sure that with 180K routes, there's gotta be at least a dozen
> that we can't
> actually talk to...

If they make an effort to talk to you, and you do not make a similar 
effort
to talk to them, then you're not part of the Internet. The Internet is the
network that has resulted from this philosophy. It is this philosophy that
makes it the Internet.

> But oddly enough, I *seem* to be on the Internet. What's wrong
> with this picture?

What's wrong is that you are misrepresenting yourself and your 
connection
philosophy. You are, through your providers and peers making that effort.
Buying Internet access from someone who purports to provide it is one way of
trying to connect with anyone who tries to connect with you.

DS

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:57 PM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:


On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 01:59:01PM -0400, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:


You are mistaken.

If I sent 100 Gbps outbound and 20 inbound, I can sell 40-60 Gbps of
additional inbound for FAR, FAR less than 40-60 Gbps of additional
outbound.

Zero cost?  Probably not.  Trivial cost?  Possibly, depends on  
network.


Patrick, I keep telling you, you are not an ISP. :)


Ha, ha.



Yes clearly there is SOME reduction in equipment cost at the edge, you
need to buy fewer peering and transit ports if there is available  
capacity
on a full duplex circuit in the opposite direction. You may also  
see some
savings on the customer edge where you are utilizing the extra  
capacity in

the opposite direction on trunk ports out of your aggregation layer.

Unfortunately in the core traffic is traffic, and you usually don't  
see
such an obvious "but I have this extra capacity in the other  
direction"

pattern. The opex cost of hauling the bits that other folks hot potato
onto you is going to quickly negate the capex cost of the equipment. I
know you don't deal with this, since as we've already established  
you are
not an ISP, but the cost of longhaul circuits (even very large and  
well
negotiated ones between major cities on major routes) is huge. The  
cost
per meg to get a bit from one side of the US to the other is  
roughly equal
to or above what people are selling transit for per meg these days,  
and in
many cases that doesn't take into account non-perfect utilization  
and the
need for backup capacity on diverse paths. There is nothing trivial  
about
this cost for an actual network, and this completely different from  
using

a rule of 95th percentile billing to squeeze some extra service out of
someone else's network for free.


Please note the "Possibly, depends on network" comment.

There are ABSOLUTELY networks where their backbone circuits are empty  
but their tail circuits to the peering locations are used in one  
direction.  There are networks which have cities / POPs / regions  
pushing or pulling more than the opposite.  There are lots & lots of  
various configurations where you can plop down a sink or a source and  
know that they will be utilizing unused resources.


Doing so, and selling it at a discount, is simply good business.

Sorry if your network isn't like that, but that doesn't make it so  
for everyone.


Oh, and I'd argue you ain't an ISP either. :)

--
TTFN,
patrick

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[Hank Nussbacher]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, William Allen Simpson wrote:

> >> Following up on my own post, according to
> >>   http://www.ams-ix.net/connected/
> >
> > Useful page, isn't it?
> >
> I wish that all IXs had one.

I wish everyones was as complete as LINX's:
https://www.linx.net/www_public/our_members/peering_matrix/
http://green.linx.net/cgi-bin/peering_matrix2.cgi

-Hank

Re: Public Works Peering

[Steve Gibbard]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, J. Oquendo wrote:


Now that I had time to marinate weird ideas even further, this is how my
previous idea `could` work for all parties. Of course those making
financial decisions would likely hate this idea since it would somehow
manage to "hurt" their business in their eyes...

States (or countries) would create a massive public NAP which would be
peered in each state. Guaranteed not to go down. Well 99.9% (snicker)
guaranteed not to falter. This network would be funded by taxpayer dollars
and anyone wanting to peer would pay solely enough to maintain this NAP.


A few models to look at (based mostly on things I've heard rather than 
studying closely, so corrections are welcome):


Saudi Arabia -- Government run monopoly transit provider.  Interconnects 
the licensed ISPs locally and provides international transit and content 
filtering.


India -- Government imposed manditory MLPA with paid settlements. 
Designed to convince VSNL (the monopoly international transit provider) to 
announce all their routes to all peers, but not having the desired effect.


Various other places -- Non-government MLPAs.  Industry run exchanges, 
with an MLPA as a condition for participating.  Often done through route 
servers.  I think Hong Kong is the biggest example of this, with the route 
server announcing 13,000 routes.  Really common in smaller exchanges in 
areas where there's huge (orders of magnitude) difference between transit 
and peering costs.


There are also a few exchanges without route servers, but where peering 
negotiation gets done on mailing lists readable by the other members, 
which looks very strange to my American eyes.


The non-government MLPAs seem to work reasonably well in some places. 
The two examples of Government regulation above don't appear to have led 
to significantly lower prices, usually the goal of peering.  US networks 
tend not to like MLPAs because it reduces control, and do seem to be good 
at keeping prices down in the major metropolitan areas, so it's possible 
US peering coordinators are at least doing things in one of the possible 
right ways.


-Steve

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 01:59:01PM -0400, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
> 
> You are mistaken.
> 
> If I sent 100 Gbps outbound and 20 inbound, I can sell 40-60 Gbps of  
> additional inbound for FAR, FAR less than 40-60 Gbps of additional  
> outbound.
> 
> Zero cost?  Probably not.  Trivial cost?  Possibly, depends on network.

Patrick, I keep telling you, you are not an ISP. :)

Yes clearly there is SOME reduction in equipment cost at the edge, you 
need to buy fewer peering and transit ports if there is available capacity 
on a full duplex circuit in the opposite direction. You may also see some 
savings on the customer edge where you are utilizing the extra capacity in 
the opposite direction on trunk ports out of your aggregation layer.

Unfortunately in the core traffic is traffic, and you usually don't see 
such an obvious "but I have this extra capacity in the other direction" 
pattern. The opex cost of hauling the bits that other folks hot potato 
onto you is going to quickly negate the capex cost of the equipment. I 
know you don't deal with this, since as we've already established you are 
not an ISP, but the cost of longhaul circuits (even very large and well 
negotiated ones between major cities on major routes) is huge. The cost 
per meg to get a bit from one side of the US to the other is roughly equal 
to or above what people are selling transit for per meg these days, and in 
many cases that doesn't take into account non-perfect utilization and the 
need for backup capacity on diverse paths. There is nothing trivial about 
this cost for an actual network, and this completely different from using 
a rule of 95th percentile billing to squeeze some extra service out of 
someone else's network for free.

Of course you could always make the argument that since circuit costs are 
usually fixed, you could sell at any price and still make more money than 
nothing as long as you have extra capacity. This may make you very popular 
in the industry for a short time, but eventually you will hit a brick wall 
where you can't afford to buy more capacity on the revenues you are 
generating. A visit to your local bankruptcy court usually follows 
quickly.

> It doesn't have to scale.
> 
> I'm perfectly willing to sell $100K worth of services for $1K worth  
> of cost, knowing I cannot sell $101K because "it does not scale".

Which is why there are a few small networks who don't have extensive 
circuits and who happen to have some extra inbound capacity available on 
their transit pipes are selling it for cheap. The concept of "it does not 
scale" explains why networks are still paying for their bandwidth, even 
their inbound bandwidth. On the original subject of Cogent, the cost of 
selling inbound bandwidth is not significantly cheaper than the cost of 
selling outbound, infact it may actually be more expensive depending on 
how you crunch the numbers for the fiber and DWDM longhaul capacity.

> But I do agree with you on the "couple years late" thing.  Putting  
> Cogent out of business will _not_ make prices go up.  (And I'm not  
> even sure this will put them out of biz.)  In fact, Cogent is not the  
> "lowest cost provider" any more - at least not for bit pushers.

Lots of people out there are emulating Cogent's business model but on a 
smaller scale in order to deliver a low price/meg number. They're often 
cutting corners that even Cogent doesn't cut though, and their model only 
works because a) they're dumping traffic onto peers and transits, and b) 
they have found transit providers who are as desperate for business at any 
price as they are.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[William Allen Simpson]

Niels Bakker wrote:


* [EMAIL PROTECTED] (William Allen Simpson) [Thu 06 Oct 2005, 
19:10 CEST]:



Following up on my own post, according to
  http://www.ams-ix.net/connected/



Useful page, isn't it?


I wish that all IXs had one.



 Cogent, Open
 Level(3), Not public
 We Dare B.V., Open

So, what did your member organization do to resolve this partition.  
Cut off Level(3)?  Sue them?



That particular member organisation has a policy of not interfering with 
its members' peering policies.  It expects its members to send packets 
only to people who explicitly asked for it over the shared 
infrastructure (via announcements of prefixes via BGP), and to pay their 
bills on time.



Arguably a very good thing.  IXs shouldn't be in the "enforcement"
business.  That's for governments.

(As you will remember, I was refuting his generalization that "private"
organizations are somehow preferable to "public" organizations.  It has
always been my preference to argue with specifics in hand.)

--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32

Re: Fw: Peering vs SFI (was Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[JC Dill]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

P.S. would the Internet be worse off if all traffic 
exchange was paid for and there was no settlement

free interconnect at all? I.e. paid peering, paid
full transit and paid partial transit on the menu?


This assumes that one party wants to receive the bits more than the 
other party wants to send them, or visa versa.  When users on network A 
request data stored on servers on network B, which network should bear 
the brunt of the cost of this transit?  Why?  Why shouldn't each network 
(no matter their size) *equally* bear the costs for transmitting the 
data between their respective customers that their customers both want 
transmitted?


Settlements are an artifact of long distance phone service where each 
call was metered and the bill was paid by just one party.  In that 
environment it made sense for the network that was paid for the LD call 
to pay the other network a part of the fee collected for the call.  But 
the internet traffic doesn't work that way.  Users pay a fee for their 
unlimited connection to their ISP.  Content providers pay for the 
bandwidth their servers require to send the content to users.  Why not 
have each user's network bear their own costs of sending/receiving data 
between other networks.  It's data their own customers are PAYING THEM 
TO TRANSMIT.


The problem is that they each want to push some of their own costs off 
on the other party whenever possible.  Only when they are both roughly 
the same size can they not get away with bullying the other party into 
paying more than their fair share and thus we have settlement-free 
peering between the large "Tier 1" networks.


In every case I've seen when peering was cut off, it was always a case 
of a big bully trying to force a smaller party (smaller network) to pay 
more than their fair share of the costs of the total transmission.  It 
doesn't matter if the smaller network is mostly content or mostly 
eyeballs or which direction most of the bits flow - all that really 
matters is that the bigger network is big enough to force the issue and 
make the smaller network pay for transit (if not paying them, paying 
*someone*) and ultimately bearing an unfair proportion of the total 
costs of transmitting the data between their two networks, between their 
two customers.


Note:  I'm all for eyeball-providers to require network providers who 
are mostly content providers to cold-potato route their bandwidth 
consuming data to the eyeball-provider's connection point closest to the 
user requesting the data, rather than hot-potato handing it off at the 
connection point closest to the content provider and leaving the eyeball 
provider with the burden of backhauling the data to their user 
requesting the data.  However, there's a HUGE difference between 
requiring cold-potato routing for content, and cutting off peering 
entirely and forcing the content provider to pay TRANSIT (to someone) to 
send the data to the eyeball provider as is apparently the current 
situation with L3 and Cogent.


jc

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:47 AM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

Inbound traffic doesn't cost them anything? That old adage only  
applies to
end user transit purchasers who have doing extra outbound and thus  
have

"free inbound" under the "higher of in or out" billing. For folks
operating an actual network, the bits use the same resources as  
traffic in
the opposite direction, and thus "cost" the same. The only reason  
Cogent

gives out free or absurdly underpriced inbound transit is ratios.


You are mistaken.

If I sent 100 Gbps outbound and 20 inbound, I can sell 40-60 Gbps of  
additional inbound for FAR, FAR less than 40-60 Gbps of additional  
outbound.


Zero cost?  Probably not.  Trivial cost?  Possibly, depends on network.


I know folks who are willing to give away all manner of things,  
inbound
and outbound, for free or low cost, because they have "excess  
capacity"

that they're already paying for and nothing better to do with it. If
you're desperate and you're willing to sacrifice long term  
marketing for
short term cash it can be a cute technique, but to quote Vijay, "it  
does
not scale". Besides, if anyone is depeering Cogent now because of  
their
disruptive pricing in the market, they're a couple years late.  
Speculate

all you like, but I suspect there is more to it than that.


It doesn't have to scale.

I'm perfectly willing to sell $100K worth of services for $1K worth  
of cost, knowing I cannot sell $101K because "it does not scale".


And anyone who isn't is probably not doing good business.

But I do agree with you on the "couple years late" thing.  Putting  
Cogent out of business will _not_ make prices go up.  (And I'm not  
even sure this will put them out of biz.)  In fact, Cogent is not the  
"lowest cost provider" any more - at least not for bit pushers.


--
TTFN,
patrick

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[Niels Bakker]

* [EMAIL PROTECTED] (William Allen Simpson) [Thu 06 Oct 2005, 19:10 CEST]:

Following up on my own post, according to
  http://www.ams-ix.net/connected/


Useful page, isn't it?



 Cogent, Open
 Level(3), Not public
 We Dare B.V., Open

So, what did your member organization do to resolve this partition.  Cut 
off Level(3)?  Sue them?


That particular member organisation has a policy of not interfering with 
its members' peering policies.  It expects its members to send packets 
only to people who explicitly asked for it over the shared infrastructure 
(via announcements of prefixes via BGP), and to pay their bills on time.



-- Niels.

--
"Calling religion a drug is an insult to drugs everywhere. 
Religion is more like the placebo of the masses."

-- MeFi user boaz

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 01:33:38PM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> It's more likely someone skimps on connections they pay per meg for than 
> peering links, therefore it's in my expereience more likely to be 
> uncongested on peering links than transit links.

Sometimes yes, sometimes. no. With a transit provider I can call a sales 
rep and have a new circuit installed in 30 days or I start getting SLA 
credits. If said provider is doing something wrong, I can vote with my 
wallet and take my business to someone else who will do better.

With a peer, even a friendly one, you are at the mercy of the cashflow, 
capacity, goodwill, and traffic engineering clue of another network that 
is essentially out of your control. Some folks are really good at peering, 
and some folks are really really bad at peering. Ask anyone who does 
enough peering and they will have a list of network about whom they will 
say "if we didn't send them X amount of traffic, we would shut their 
non-responsive prefix-leaking non-upgrading frequent-outage asses off in 
an instant". Just because a network is big and important doesn't mean that 
they are taking proper steps to manage the traffic and ensure reliable 
peering, or even that there is anyone manning the helm at all. And then 
there is AT&T... But that is an issue for another day. :)

In my experience, since there is "no revenue" associated with the peering 
port on the other side, even very big networks who depend on reliable 
peering for their business manage to sit on necessary upgrades to peers 
for months or even years longer than they would if it was a customer port.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 11:56 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote:

Let me be the punching bag for pondering this on NANOG... What  
about the
roles of governments building a consortium with Teir-1 NSP's where  
those

backbone Tiers are regulated and have predefined, strictly enforced
rulesets they'd have to follow. The irony of this is that it  
sounds both

like a nightmare and a dream.


Congratulations, you've reinvented the Internet.  This is exactly what
we did when we built the original (NSFnet).  It worked!


I would argue the NSFnet would not scale to today's Internet.  Not to  
mention today's Internet has the added value of not sucking up 90% of  
NSF's budget.



We specified regional interconnection.  If you wanted to connect,  
that's
where you had to connect, and you were required to take the traffic  
from

everybody else at the point of interconnection.  No arguments.

This partitioning is exactly what we predicted in many meetings when
discussion the terms of the contracts.


I'm wondering why "this partitioning" - predicted or not - is a "bad  
thing"?




Markets are inefficient for infrastructure and tend toward monopoly.


Strangely, the Internet has not tended toward monopoly.  If you think  
otherwise, you have been reading too many press releases.



Idiot laissez-faire pseudo-libertarians forget that all markets  
require

regulation and politics.


Politics are a natural part of human interaction.  Regulation  
sometimes follows.


The Internet is fairly unregulated.  It works fairly well - better  
than many regulated industries.


I guess I'm missing your point?

--
TTFN,
patrick

Re: Press Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[JC Dill]

William Allen Simpson wrote:


Finally, some press taking notice:
  http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4531


More at:






and of course the obligatory slashdot thread:



jc

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[William Allen Simpson]

William Allen Simpson wrote:

How do you expect to enforce your "member" regulations?

Again (to keep this on-topic), this partitioning is exactly what we 
predicted.  And I don't see your member regulations having any effect.



Following up on my own post, according to
  http://www.ams-ix.net/connected/

 Cogent, Open
 Level(3), Not public
 We Dare B.V., Open

So, what did your member organization do to resolve this partition.  Cut
off Level(3)?  Sue them?

And how quickly would you expect this resolution?

Compare and contrast with the well-respected Packet Clearing House:
  http://www.pch.net/

--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[William Allen Simpson]

Erik Haagsman wrote:
On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 11:56 -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote: 

This partitioning is exactly what we predicted in many meetings when
discussion the terms of the contracts.

Markets are inefficient for infrastructure and tend toward monopoly.



How does replacing non-profit organisations (which most public IX'es
are) with government bodies and governmental legislation improve
anything...?


Government _is_ a non-profit organization, with generally broader
representation.

How does replacing a representative government with a smaller feudal
organization improve anything?



Idiot laissez-faire pseudo-libertarians forget that all markets require
regulation and politics.



But why government regulated instead of IX member regulated...?


Because as much as it's best not to rely on thugs with guns, I really
don't want the thugs with guns to be private armies.

How do you expect to enforce your "member" regulations?

Again (to keep this on-topic), this partitioning is exactly what we 
predicted.  And I don't see your member regulations having any effect.


--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32

Re: Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[Erik Haagsman]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 11:56 -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> J. Oquendo wrote:
> 
> > Let me be the punching bag for pondering this on NANOG... What about the
> > roles of governments building a consortium with Teir-1 NSP's where those
> > backbone Tiers are regulated and have predefined, strictly enforced
> > rulesets they'd have to follow. The irony of this is that it sounds both
> > like a nightmare and a dream.
> > 



> This partitioning is exactly what we predicted in many meetings when
> discussion the terms of the contracts.
> 
> Markets are inefficient for infrastructure and tend toward monopoly.

How does replacing non-profit organisations (which most public IX'es
are) with government bodies and governmental legislation improve
anything...?

> Idiot laissez-faire pseudo-libertarians forget that all markets require
> regulation and politics.

But why government regulated instead of IX member regulated...?


-- 
---
Erik Haagsman
Network Architect
We Dare BV
Tel: +31(0)10-7507008
Fax: +31(0)10-7507005
http://www.we-dare.nl

Press Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[William Allen Simpson]

Finally, some press taking notice:
  http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4531
--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32

Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

[William Allen Simpson]

J. Oquendo wrote:


Let me be the punching bag for pondering this on NANOG... What about the
roles of governments building a consortium with Teir-1 NSP's where those
backbone Tiers are regulated and have predefined, strictly enforced
rulesets they'd have to follow. The irony of this is that it sounds both
like a nightmare and a dream.


Congratulations, you've reinvented the Internet.  This is exactly what
we did when we built the original (NSFnet).  It worked!

We specified regional interconnection.  If you wanted to connect, that's
where you had to connect, and you were required to take the traffic from
everybody else at the point of interconnection.  No arguments.

This partitioning is exactly what we predicted in many meetings when
discussion the terms of the contracts.

Markets are inefficient for infrastructure and tend toward monopoly.

Idiot laissez-faire pseudo-libertarians forget that all markets require
regulation and politics.

--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[tony sarendal]

On 06/10/05, Patrick W. Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Oct 6, 2005, at 10:19 AM, tony sarendal wrote:
>
> > This is not the first and certainly not the last time we see this kind
> > of event happen.
> > Purchasing a single-homed service from a Tier-1 provider will
> > guarantee that you
> > are affected by this every time it happens.
>
> s/every time it happens/every time it happens to YOUR upstream
>
> People on Sprint, AT&T, GLBX, MCI, etc. were unaffected.  Only people
> who single-home to L3 or Cogent have disconnectivity.
>
>
> > Now, is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling
> > internet access ?
>
> It's still a good argument, because Marketing != Reality. :)
>

Patrick, it happens to every PA customer who buys his service from one
of the Tier-1 providers active in the de-peering.

If a PA customer buys his service from a non-tier1 this will most
likely not happen, unless that provider has bought transit in a very
unwise way.

The entire point is that it's not always good to be too close to tier-1 space.

PS. sorry about the double-post Patrick.

New talks for LA

[Susan Harris]

Greetings - We've added a few new talks for LA, marked with ***. Abstracts 
are at http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0510/topics.html.


SUNDAY ACTIVITIES 
-


   - All-day Tutorial (9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.)
   Getting Started with IPv6
   Level: Introductory
   Jordi Palet, Consulintel

   - Afternoon Tutorials
  - Best Practices for Determining the Traffic Matrix in IP Networks
  Level: Intermediate
  Thomas Telkamp, Cariden

  - Scaling Considerations in MPLS Networks
  Level: Intermediate/Advanced
  Ina Minei, Juniper

  - BGP Multihoming Techniques
  Level: Introductory/Intermediate
  Philip Smith, Cisco

** Steering Committee Community Meeting, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.

** Welcome Reception! Details to follow, 7:30 - ?

GENERAL SESSION
---

*** - NetFlow-based Traffic Analysis Techniques for Peering Networks
Richard Steenbergen, nLayer Communications, and Nathan Patrick,
UNINETT

*** - Route/Flow Fusion--Making Traffic Measurement Useful
Van Jacobson, Haobo Yu, and Bruce Mah, Packet Design

*** - Infrastructure Security Survey Overview
Craig Labovitz and Danny McPherson, Arbor

*** - IPv6 Deployment Issues: A Tier 1 Perspective
Stewart Bamford, Level3

- Near-term Futures for the Industry
Geoff Huston, APNIC

- AS Consumption Patterns
Geoff Huston, APNIC

- ASNs MIA: A Comparision of RIR Statistics and RIS Reality
Rene Wilhelm and Henk Uijterwaal, RIPE NCC

- Stager: Web-Based Statistics Displays
Arne Oslebo, Uninett

- Shim6: Network Operator Concerns
Jason Schiller, UUNET

- BLINC: Multilevel Traffic Classification in the Dark
Thomas Karagiannis, UC Riverside; Konstantina Papagiannaki, Intel
Research; Michalis Faloutsos, UC Riverside

- Should Internet Service Providers Fear Peer-Assisted Content?
Thomas Karagiannis, UC Riverside; Pablo Rodriguez, Microsoft
Research; Konstantina Papagiannaki, Intel Research

- Mitigating Superfluous Multicast Data Traffic and Control State
John Kristoff, Northwestern Univ.

- Routers with Small Buffers
Yashar Ganjali, Guido Appenzeller, Ashish Goel, Tim Roughgarden,
and Nick McKeown, Stanford Univ.

RESEARCH FORUM
--

*** - Geographic Locality of IP Prefixes
Mike Freedman, NYU; Mythili Vutukuru, Nick Feamster, and Hari
Balakrishnan, MIT

*** - Mining Anomalies in Network-Wide Flow Data
Anukool Lakhina, Mark Crovella, and Christophe Diot,
Thomson Paris Research Lab

- Dynamic AS Renumbering.Research & Results on new BGP Mechanisms
Sue Hares, NextHop, and Patrick Bose, Lockheed-Martin

SPECIAL TUESDAY TUTORIAL


- Getting to Know ARIN (1:00-1:30 p.m.)
Ray Plzak, ARIN

MONDAY AFTERNOON BOFS
-

- IAB IPv6 Multi-Homing BOF
Dave Meyer, Cisco, moderator

- BGP Data Analysis BOF
Mohit Lad, Lixia Zhang, and Yiguo Wu, UCLA
Nick Feamster, MIT; Dan Massey, Colorado State University;
Manish Karir, Merit

- ISP Security and NSP-SEC BOF X
Danny McPherson, Arbor, moderator

- Peering BOF X
William B. Norton, Equinix, moderator

Re: mx error

[Christopher L. Morrow]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Randy Bush wrote:

>
> since i can not mail to you
>

rfc compliance, it's not just a good idea...

ANSWER SECTION:
politrix.org.   3600IN  MX  10 209.94.123.155.

:( (unless ICANN just opened a new TLD: .155 ?)

> randy
>
> ---
>
> From: Mail Delivery System <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
> Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 14:33:15 +
>
> This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
>
> A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
> recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
>
>   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> It appears that the DNS operator for politrix.org
> has installed an invalid MX record with an IP address
> instead of a domain name on the right hand side.
>

Re: Public Works Peering

[Erik Haagsman]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 10:26 -0400, J. Oquendo wrote:

> Now that I had time to marinate weird ideas even further, this is how my
> previous idea `could` work for all parties. Of course those making
> financial decisions would likely hate this idea since it would somehow
> manage to "hurt" their business in their eyes...
> 
> States (or countries) would create a massive public NAP which would be
> peered in each state. Guaranteed not to go down. Well 99.9% (snicker)
> guaranteed not to falter. This network would be funded by taxpayer dollars
> and anyone wanting to peer would pay solely enough to maintain this NAP.

Marinate and weird are certainly . How is this radically different from
current public NAPs, funded by their members without profit as the main
driving force and what good would it do? Dragging governments to places
we'd normally wouldn't want them? Please let this idea rest in pieces.

Cheers,

Erik


-- 
---
Erik Haagsman
Network Architect
We Dare BV
Tel: +31(0)10-7507008
Fax: +31(0)10-7507005
http://www.we-dare.nl

Re: Public Works Peering

[Michael . Dillon]

> > > /* tip never write e-mail within the first hour of your waking 
morning
> > */
> >
> > Let me be the first to congratulate you on such
> > an excellent idea.
> 
> Now that I had time to marinate weird ideas even further, this is how my
> previous idea `could` work for all parties.

Somehow I think you have missed the truly great
idea in your first message...

Hint: the best ideas are simple and elegant and can often
be explained in a single sentence!

--Michael Dillon

Re: Public Works Peering

[James Spenceley]

A consortium of companies using this NAP would engineer the network  
since
most times government officials have little clue on the engineering  
side

of things, nor would they understand it more than those already in the
industry.


Having read this thread,

I'm going to assume most of the engineers who want to peer there, are  
no more qualified than said government officials.



This NAP would be unbiased as to "my bgp tables are bigger than
yours" arguments, and would pass traffic unbiased to most destinations
without flaw.


the time of MLPA has long since passed, let it rest in peace.


J. Oquendo


--
James

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 10:19 AM, tony sarendal wrote:


This is not the first and certainly not the last time we see this kind
of event happen.
Purchasing a single-homed service from a Tier-1 provider will  
guarantee that you

are affected by this every time it happens.


s/every time it happens/every time it happens to YOUR upstream

People on Sprint, AT&T, GLBX, MCI, etc. were unaffected.  Only people  
who single-home to L3 or Cogent have disconnectivity.




Now, is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling
internet access ?


It's still a good argument, because Marketing != Reality. :)

--
TTFN,
patrick

mx error

[Randy Bush]

since i can not mail to you

randy

---

From: Mail Delivery System <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 14:33:15 +

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It appears that the DNS operator for politrix.org
has installed an invalid MX record with an IP address
instead of a domain name on the right hand side.

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Randy Bush]

>> Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when
>> selling internet access ?
> Its a great sales argument. That's why everyone claims to be
> one. It just sounds SO good. And its not like the Peering
> Police are going to enforce it.  What does it mean in real
> life? Nothing. Nada. An organization's SFI status is a
> particularly poor criteria for choosing a transit
> provider. There are so many better factors to use - support,
> packet loss, price, latency, availability, provisioning speed
> - you name it, its a better criteria than SFI status.

packet loss and latency to *where*?  before replying, consider
that most of a leaf's traffic is either to/from another leaf of
a tier-1 to which they're (possibly indirectly) downstream, or
to/from the tree of a tier-1 which peers with the tier-1 to
which they're attached.

if tier-n, where n > 1, is buying transit from tier-1s, which
they have to do, then the price game seems to be pretty
determined unless one likes to run at a loss or is cross-
subsidizing from some other product line.

all your bases are belong to us. :-)

randy

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Stephen J. Wilcox]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, tony sarendal wrote:

> 
> On 06/10/05, Stephen J. Wilcox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, tony sarendal wrote:
> >
> > > Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling internet
> > > access ?
> >
> > its the same as it always was, its a marketing positive. but thats because 
> > the
> > market is dumb.
> >
> > if you wish to make your purchasing decision on 'tier-1' status thats up to 
> > you,
> > but i'll be looking at performance, price, strategy, service level and what 
> > type
> > of supplier i want for a company like mine.
> >
> > cogent is cheap and you get what you pay for. level3 is mid-price, but they
> > really dont care much about their customers (or thats what i found). 
> > perhaps you
> > want better customer service or to deal with a smaller company to gain their
> > attention and respect.
> >
> 
> I didn't mean for this to sound so much like a question, but I belive
> I posted before my first cup of coffee.
> 
> This is not the first and certainly not the last time we see this kind
> of event happen.
> Purchasing a single-homed service from a Tier-1 provider will guarantee that 
> you
> are affected by this every time it happens.
> 
> Now, is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling
> internet access ?

how would purchasing from a tier-2 be any different (and by historical 
definition cogent is a tier-2), i've seen networks intentionally block routes 
from competitors for various reasons, and ultimately this is about your level 
of 
connectivity to the parts of the Internet

anyone can have connectivity issues either by choice or by accident, you have 
to 
decide whether your chosen supplier is giving you a service level you are happy 
with for the price, what the risks are and what failure modes they are likely 
to 
present.

Steve

Public Works Peering

[J. Oquendo]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

>
> > /* tip never write e-mail within the first hour of your waking morning
> */
>
> Let me be the first to congratulate you on such
> an excellent idea.
>
> --Michael Dillon
>
>

Now that I had time to marinate weird ideas even further, this is how my
previous idea `could` work for all parties. Of course those making
financial decisions would likely hate this idea since it would somehow
manage to "hurt" their business in their eyes...

States (or countries) would create a massive public NAP which would be
peered in each state. Guaranteed not to go down. Well 99.9% (snicker)
guaranteed not to falter. This network would be funded by taxpayer dollars
and anyone wanting to peer would pay solely enough to maintain this NAP.

A consortium of companies using this NAP would engineer the network since
most times government officials have little clue on the engineering side
of things, nor would they understand it more than those already in the
industry. This NAP would be unbiased as to "my bgp tables are bigger than
yours" arguments, and would pass traffic unbiased to most destinations
without flaw.

I'm not one for any type of government intervention but at current pace,
how long would it be before the lawsuits start coming out of de-peering
(is that actually a term). In the long run it is not beneficial in my eyes
for companies to start shafting each other via capitalistic methods of who
will pass traffic to whomever else. I know for one as the end user, I
would be highly upset if two separate companies depeered and affected my
company's workflow. I would also be even more upset if somehow de-peering
affected my life/lifestyle or that of my family in some capacity.

Think of something along the lines of dare I say "national security" for
INSERT_YOUR_COUNTRY_HERE. What if two main infrastructures were broken
because someone de-peered from another provider. Far Fetched Scenario:

Lt. Jones "Sir we've lost all connections with $FOOBAR_DEPARTMENT...
People can die if we don't get the proper information..."
Senior Lt. Doe "How did this happen! We have a delivery of medical
supplies... Track them down."
Lt. Jones "We can't sir. We have no connectivity"
Senior Lt. Doe "What do you mean"
Lt. Jones "Well a provider de-peered..."

Sure it's far fetched to a degree, but there are industries outside of
government that could seriously be affected by de-peering actions. Health
industries, say the insurance companies right now helping out natural
disaster victims... I could think of an insane amount of scenarios that
could happen because of actions such as those taken by L3 and Cogent.

Somewhere along this thread is a VOIP thread spinoff... So what about
people who can't dial (e-)911 right now. People can die if you think about
the worst case scenario because of nothing more than greed. So for those
who reply back with some "go to hell" like message I suggest you go back
to your core and read up on ethics and morals before putting a dollar sign
on a life. /* EOF MORAL RAMBLINGS */ Anyhow, I could see a benefit to
having say a public works NAP. Outside of monopolistic reach working
rather well.

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
J. Oquendo
GPG Key ID 0x97B43D89
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x97B43D89

"How a man plays the game shows something of his
 character - how he loses shows all" - Mr. Luckey

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
J. Oquendo
GPG Key ID 0x97B43D89
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x97B43D89

"How a man plays the game shows something of his
 character - how he loses shows all" - Mr. Luckey

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[tony sarendal]

On 06/10/05, Stephen J. Wilcox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, tony sarendal wrote:
>
> > Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling internet
> > access ?
>
> its the same as it always was, its a marketing positive. but thats because the
> market is dumb.
>
> if you wish to make your purchasing decision on 'tier-1' status thats up to 
> you,
> but i'll be looking at performance, price, strategy, service level and what 
> type
> of supplier i want for a company like mine.
>
> cogent is cheap and you get what you pay for. level3 is mid-price, but they
> really dont care much about their customers (or thats what i found). perhaps 
> you
> want better customer service or to deal with a smaller company to gain their
> attention and respect.
>

I didn't mean for this to sound so much like a question, but I belive
I posted before my first cup of coffee.

This is not the first and certainly not the last time we see this kind
of event happen.
Purchasing a single-homed service from a Tier-1 provider will guarantee that you
are affected by this every time it happens.

Now, is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling
internet access ?

/Tony
 going for more coffee

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 9:11 AM, Daniel Golding wrote:


Cogent does purchase transit from Verio to Sprint, AOL, and other
locations (but not to Level 3).  Perhaps Dan would like to explain
why that is relevant to the discussion at hand?  Or why that puts the
"ball" in Cogent's court?


Since you demanded it - Cogent buys transit. Regardless of what  
their route
filters are currently set to, or what communities or arrangements  
they have
with Verio, its transit. They purchase bandwidth to access other  
networks.
Although I have not seen their transit contract, its not a stretch  
to say
that they can use these connections to reach L3. I realize they may  
claim

otherwise, but I have personal experience with them lying about their
transit arrangements. And no, not some call center rep or NOC guy,  
either.

Try a Cogent executive.


I think you are confused.  If Cogent pays Verio to receive (for  
instance) only 1239 prefixes, and to propagate 174 prefixes only to  
1239, then Cogent cannot "make a configuration change" to fix  
things.  It would require a contractual change.


But even if they could, why does this put the onus only on Cogent?   
Cogent has just as much right to not spend money to reach L3 as L3  
has to not spend money to reach Cogent.



Perhaps we are miscommunicating.  I am not saying Cogent should not  
buy transit to reach L3.  It is a business decision, not a technical  
argument.  I am saying your idea of "Cogent buys transit, therefore  
the ball is in Cogent's court" is Just Plain Wrong.  The "ball" is in  
_both_ of their "courts".




It is strange that people have to be reminded no network has the
"right" to use any other network's resources without permission.
Most people realize this in one direction.  For instance, the "tier
ones" love to point out Cogent has no "right" to peer with Level 3.
Absolutely correct.

What some people seem to forget is that Level 3 has no right to force
Cogent to buy transit to get to Level 3.


Sure. Cogent is free to offer a partial routing table and take  
their chances

with their customers.


If you think the inverse of the above is also true, we agree.

However, you posts have absolutely at least implied (and I would  
argue outright claim) that L3 should not be expected to do anything  
because they are in the "SFI club", and Cogent should do something  
because they "buy transit".


Perhaps we do agree more than I thought.  Did I misunderstand your  
comments about SFI and balls and courts and stuff?  Do you think this  
situation is bilateral, or does one side have more responsibility to  
ensure interconnectivity than the other?


--
TTFN,
patrick

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Stephen J. Wilcox]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, tony sarendal wrote:

> Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling internet
> access ?

its the same as it always was, its a marketing positive. but thats because the 
market is dumb.

if you wish to make your purchasing decision on 'tier-1' status thats up to 
you, 
but i'll be looking at performance, price, strategy, service level and what 
type 
of supplier i want for a company like mine.

cogent is cheap and you get what you pay for. level3 is mid-price, but they 
really dont care much about their customers (or thats what i found). perhaps 
you 
want better customer service or to deal with a smaller company to gain their 
attention and respect.

choose your supplier based on your own criteria, not someone elses or on who 
has 
the most marketing points.

Steve

depeering season?

[Jon Lewis]

I've been told verbally (still waiting for it in writing) that UUNet and 
TWTC (4323) are about to depeer (today?).  I wouldn't have guessed TWTC 
had SFI with UUNet...so maybe they're just falling back from paid peering 
to cheaper transit.


--
 Jon Lewis   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net| 
_ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_

Re: Who is a Tier 1?

[Michael . Dillon]

> /* tip never write e-mail within the first hour of your waking morning 
*/

Let me be the first to congratulate you on such
an excellent idea.

--Michael Dillon

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Daniel Golding]

On 10/6/05 6:43 AM, "tony sarendal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 
> Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling
> internet access ?


Its a great sales argument. That's why everyone claims to be one. It just
sounds SO good. And its not like the Peering Police are going to enforce it.

What does it mean in real life? Nothing. Nada. An organization's SFI status
is a particularly poor criteria for choosing a transit provider. There are
so many better factors to use - support, packet loss, price, latency,
availability, provisioning speed - you name it, its a better criteria than
SFI status. 

- Dan

> 
> --
> Tony Sarendal - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> IP/Unix
>-= The scorpion replied,
>"I couldn't help it, it's my nature" =-

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Daniel Golding]

On 10/6/05 1:41 AM, "Patrick W. Gilmore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 5, 2005, at 4:13 PM, Daniel Golding wrote:
> 
>> They can. Cogent has transit and is preventing traffic from
>> traversing its
>> transit connection to reach Level(3). Level(3) does not have
>> transit - they
>> are in a condition of settlement free interconnection (SFI). The
>> ball is in
>> Cogent's court. This is not the first time or the second that they
>> have
>> chosen to partition.
> 
> Cogent does purchase transit from Verio to Sprint, AOL, and other
> locations (but not to Level 3).  Perhaps Dan would like to explain
> why that is relevant to the discussion at hand?  Or why that puts the
> "ball" in Cogent's court?

Since you demanded it - Cogent buys transit. Regardless of what their route
filters are currently set to, or what communities or arrangements they have
with Verio, its transit. They purchase bandwidth to access other networks.
Although I have not seen their transit contract, its not a stretch to say
that they can use these connections to reach L3. I realize they may claim
otherwise, but I have personal experience with them lying about their
transit arrangements. And no, not some call center rep or NOC guy, either.
Try a Cogent executive.

> 
> And no, L3's "SFI" status does not mean it's Cogent's fault.

There is no fault here. This is a business arrangement for all concerned.
Cogent can make a configuration change to use their transit to reach
Level(3). Level(3) has depeered them. I don't think anyone is "right" or
"wrong". Generally, when one plays the peering game and loses, one eats it.
Cogent however, is putting up a fight first. I don't blame them - its what I
would do. However, they must face the music with their customers.

> 
> 
> It is strange that people have to be reminded no network has the
> "right" to use any other network's resources without permission.
> Most people realize this in one direction.  For instance, the "tier
> ones" love to point out Cogent has no "right" to peer with Level 3.
> Absolutely correct.
> 
> What some people seem to forget is that Level 3 has no right to force
> Cogent to buy transit to get to Level 3.

Sure. Cogent is free to offer a partial routing table and take their chances
with their customers.

> 
> If Level 3 doesn't mind not being able to pass packets to Cogent,
> that's fine.  If they do mind, they need to figure out a way to solve
> the problem - with Cogent.  The inverse is true as well.  As RAS
> said, it takes two to tango.
> 
> 
> This problem will be solved "soon" (in human time - days, weeks at
> most).  One of the networks may go out of business, but that "solves"
> the problem because there would no longer be locations on the
> Internet someone couldn't reach.  I suspect it will be solved by less
> drastic means.

Usually these situations resolve in 2 - 10 days. At least, that's been the
pattern. My prediction is that Cogent will fold, because they have in the
past. Of course, I can't speak to Level(3)'s intestinal fortitude.


- Dan

Re: (de)peering

[Robert E . Seastrom]

Pekka Savola <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>  er... the first depeering flaps have -already- occured in IPv6
>>  space.  there are several (mostly EU-based) ISPs that refuse to
>>  peer w/ folks using 3ffe:: space and/or filter that prefix.
>
> Which is probably a GOOD thing, right?

Considering that today we're exactly 8 months from the putative
"phase-out" day for 3ffe:: I certainly think that's a Good Thing.

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3701.txt

---Rob

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[David Barak]

--- "Patrick W. Gilmore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> It is strange that people have to be reminded no
> network has the  
> "right" to use any other network's resources without
> permission.   
> Most people realize this in one direction.  For
> instance, the "tier  
> ones" love to point out Cogent has no "right" to
> peer with Level 3.   
> Absolutely correct.
> 
> What some people seem to forget is that Level 3 has
> no right to force  
> Cogent to buy transit to get to Level 3.

This is where you lost me: if there is no obligation
for an SFI between them, then each player absolutely
can force the other to buy transit to reach them.  The
way it plays out is this: whichever player's customers
are more upset about the inability to reach the other
will force that player to blink and either buy transit
or make some other arrangement.

The term "peering" is useful to describe SFI, because
there is an implied equivalence between the players:
i.e. it would hurt them both equally to partition.  As
was said by someone earlier, if it is more valuable to
one party than the other, the business relationship is
skewed, and ripe for a conversion to a
settlement-based interconnection.

> P.S. Does anyone else get that Baby Bell feeling
> whenever someone  
> talks about being a "Tier One"?
> 

heh.  I'm certain we're about to see the Nth iteration
of the "who's a Tier One Provider" discussion, and
I'll repeat: there are two contexts for "tier one" -
marketing and routing.  In marketing, everyone with a
big, national network is a tier-one.  In routing,
definitions differ, and whatever definition is used,
it's a smaller set than the marketing bunch...



David Barak
Need Geek Rock?  Try The Franchise: 
http://www.listentothefranchise.com




__ 
Yahoo! for Good 
Donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. 
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/ 

Did we forget that ISP's are businesses?

[Leo Bicknell]

As Randy pointed out, this conversation has been fairly clue free.
Working as a peering coordinator for a large ISP I can tell you
that most of the posts in this thread have been so wrong it makes
me laugh.

ISP's are businesses, and let me tell you that peering is no
exception.  People seem to like to think that "settlement free
interconnections" are "free", but nothing could be further from the
truth.  You have to buy routers and the cards that go in them,
provision transport services to the peering location, and then on
to the peer.  Provide enough backhaul in your network from where
your customers are located to where the peers are located.  You
have to pay lawyers to review contracts, engineers to configure and
troubleshoot sessions, and managers to negotiate the whole deal.

The budget for "settlement free interconnections" at a major ISP
can run into the millions of dollars.  Two major ISP's may have
8xOC-48 between them.  That's probably $200,000 in router costs
alone.  Yes, sometimes you can get a $200 cross connect, but sometimes
you also have to have the $6k/month circuit, for each one, creating
a $42,000/month cost.  That's a half million dollars a year.

When you look at the requirements, geographic diversity, volume,
ratio, number of routes what is really happening is the companies
are trying to make sure there is some balance of costs.  It doesn't
have to be a 50/50 split...everyone uses their own assets to reduce
their costs, but there has to be some equality.  Personally, I'm
not a fan of the technical requirements to make them equal, but
rather like to negotiate equality, but everyone has their own
approach.

Back to the issue at hand.  What I can tell from this situation is
that Level 3 thought they were paying a lot of costs for very little
return on investment.  The idea that Level 3 would take this action
because Cogent was selling cheaper seems a bit far fetched to me.
Level 3 knows this is going to hurt their customers as well.  Indeed,
I'll bet this went all the way to the Level 3 CEO for approval
first, because they knew their was going to be pain.  This isn't
some router cowboy going nuts in the middle of the night, this is
a business backed into a corner.

Why?  We'll never know the real story.  Maybe L3 is paying for third
party circuits because cogent doesn't touch their network and it's
costing them a boatload.  Maybe L3 wanted to move to GigE peering
for cheap high density ports, and Cogent wouldn't budge from using
OC-3's because their routers don't have great GigE density.  Maybe
traffic between the two has dropped to 20 megs, and so L3 doesn't
think maintaining ports is a justified cost.  Maybe the ratio is
20:1, and that was finally enough for L3 to feel they were carrying
too much of the transport cost.  Most likely it's a combination of
all of these issues.

Bottom line is some engineer had to dress up and go over to the
land of suits and explain to them that yes, Level 3 was going to
totally screw their own customers, but it was also going to save
$X, where $X is probably fairly large, and so they really had no
choice.

Least I seem like I'm on Level 3's side, it may well be that they
have high costs due to their own stupidity.  Perhaps they cut a
deal with Equinix for $5,000/month cross connects.  Perhaps they
pay list price for their routers.  Perhaps they are about to go
down the tubes.

As for those who want to re-architect the Internet to "fix" this
problem, please go away.  It's not a technical problem.  It's a
business problem.  Two companies, each responsible for their own
bottom line couldn't find an economically feesable way to interconnect.
Any attempt to "force" the interconnection (either via regulation,
transit through third parties, etc) will RAISE prices for all
involved.  The key here is that the peering was not economically
viable for some reason.

It will be interesting to see how this is resolved in the end.  As
time passes, there will be increased pressure on both companies to
fix this problem.  Single homed customers are going to think twice
about connecting to either one.

My own observations?  This appears to be happening to Cogent a lot
lately.  This makes me wonder if part of the reason they have been
able to offer lower costs is by finding ways to take advantage of
peers and transfer costs to them which is causing the peers to
notice and take action.  I also find Cogent's practice of offering
Level 3 customers free service unseemly.  They are partially
responsible for the outage, and are trying to use that fact to lure
customers.  That makes me wonder if they've written off Level 3
entirely already...after all if you're planning on working out a
deal with someone you don't rub salt in their wounds as a first
step.

-- 
   Leo Bicknell - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.tmbg.org


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Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, tony sarendal wrote:

Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling internet 
access ?


Personally I think it's good strategy to multihome with one "tier-1" and 
one not so "tier-1". The ones further down the foodchain are more likely 
to be "peering whores" and therefore provide better connectivty to others 
like them.


It's more likely someone skimps on connections they pay per meg for than 
peering links, therefore it's in my expereience more likely to be 
uncongested on peering links than transit links.


So my answer to your question is "it depends". Using Tier-1:s as your only 
uplinks means everybody else is paying per meg to send traffic to you, is 
that what you want?


--
Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Who is a Tier 1?

[Pekka Savola]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, J. Oquendo wrote:

/* tip never write e-mail within the first hour of your waking morning */


if you just would have followed your own advise..

Re: Who is a Tier 1?

[J. Oquendo]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> A few years ago you could probably bamboozle them about your
> secret sauce containing "transit free", "peering", "x exchange points"
> and so on. Today I suspect they are less susceptible to that
> kind of story and more likely to rely on the experience of
> existing customers. And if the existing customers of L3 and
> Cogent are experiencing agony, what kind of marketing story
> does that tell?

Let me be the punching bag for pondering this on NANOG... What about the
roles of governments building a consortium with Teir-1 NSP's where those
backbone Tiers are regulated and have predefined, strictly enforced
rulesets they'd have to follow. The irony of this is that it sounds both
like a nightmare and a dream.

USTIER [peer] EUTIER [peer] ASIATIER
  | |  |
   \ \  \
\ \  \
$STATE_TIER  $COUNTRY_TIER  $COUNTRY_TIER

Where in the US there would be a main focal tier funded by this
consortium. This might minimize the roles of greedy corporate execs
breaking routes. It would be (again) funded by the gov, taxes, and monies
can be generated by peering with this network. The monies charged would be
sufficient to keep it running. In this plan, there could be less
mechanisms of Adelphia/Worldcom fuzzy math of selling a billion years
worth of bandwidth for write offs as well.

/* tip never write e-mail within the first hour of your waking morning */

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
J. Oquendo
GPG Key ID 0x97B43D89
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x97B43D89

"How a man plays the game shows something of his
 character - how he loses shows all" - Mr. Luckey

RE: VoIP outage (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Michael . Dillon]

> 1000 users, 15 hours, isn't all that much when you think about it - At 
some
> point in the near future, an split such as this is almost assured 
ofhaving FCC
> attention due to the consequential consumer & business impact.

If I understand the way existing VoIP service work,
this depeering situation means that VoIP customers,
trying to call from one network to another, will not
be able to connect because the VoIP provider does
not relay voice packets. So the VoIP provider will
see that both the calling and called party are on
the net, however the flow of voice packets will fail.

Has anyone asked Vonage and others what they think
of this? It is almost certain to be affecting some
of their customers.

--Michael Dillon

Re: Banks and VCs (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Michael . Dillon]

> All the 
> while, Cogent undercuts the market of every other carrier who isn't as 
> efficient as they are, leading to massive losses, bankruptcy filing 
after 
> bankruptcy filing, out of court reorganizations and purchases for 
foreign 
> companies, etc.

Banks and Venture Capitalists love this. They think in terms
of markets, not in terms of companies. Banks and VCs both make
more money when a market is not overcrowded with competitors.
Obviously, if you can spend a bit of money to fund a company
which will kill off all the weaker competitors, and make that
money back in a strong company who benefits from larger market
share, then it makes sense in the big picture.

I don't have any evidence that this is what is happening
in this case, however this kind of thing is done to
stabilise markets. To the winner go the spoils. All
the network assets are not destroyed. For the most part
they are aggregated into the networks of companies 
who buy the bankrupt assets. Sometimes a network 
operator will buy and integrate a functioning network.
Other times, the corporate customer base will buy the
boxes and become more likely to buy bandwidth from
surviving operators.

> To force either 
> one to peer by law or regulation would be even more disruptive to the 
> industry as a whole, which may even lead to a complete collapse of the 
> existing peering system as we know it. 

I think that's too harsh. It would certainly lead to change but
that is not the same as collapse. If companies were forced by
law to peer, then they would have to do so under a settlement
system. Since IP network revenue flow is not based on the 
end-point usage (per minute call charges) there is no need
to engage in massive data collection and analysis as the
voice business does. Something based simply on netflow
data from peering interconnects combined with the the average
bandwidth price on each companies top ten customer contracts
would add very little cost to computing the settlement amount.

I don't advocate one way or another. But I do expect to
see things change when there is instability.

--Michael Dillon

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[Michael . Dillon]

> Depeering never makes sense to me.  Customers of both companies are 
> expecting their vendor to connect them to the customers of the other 
> company.  These customers are each paying their respective vendor for 
> this service.  Why should one vendor pay the other for this traffic that 

> is mutually beneficial to them while the other pays nothing?  Why does 
> the amount of bandwidth or the direction it travels make any difference? 

>   The customers are PAYING for the bandwidth.  If each vendor pays their 

> own costs to a peering point then they should be passing that cost onto 
> their respective customers as part of the *customer's* bandwidth bill.

Perhaps someone wants to make this argument before a judge
in order to set a legal precedent for mandatory peering
with settlements?

--Michael Dillon

Re: Who is a Tier 1? (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Michael . Dillon]

> Cogent and L3 had _no_ interconnectivity besides the direct peering 
> relationship.  L3 knew it, Cogent knew it.  L3 made a decision to 
> sever that direct relationship, and bifurcation ensued.  This was not 
> only not a surprised, it was expected.  Whether Cogent is a "tier 
> one" or not is irrelevant to the decision, and the resulting effects.

I suspect that the consumer definition of "Tier 1" is something
like "provides good connectivity to the entire Internet". By this
definition, L3 and Cogent are not currently tier 1 providers.
The consumers that I had in mind are the VP finance types who
approve the spend on Internet services.

A few years ago you could probably bamboozle them about your
secret sauce containing "transit free", "peering", "x exchange points"
and so on. Today I suspect they are less susceptible to that
kind of story and more likely to rely on the experience of
existing customers. And if the existing customers of L3 and
Cogent are experiencing agony, what kind of marketing story
does that tell?

--Michael Dillon

Fw: Peering vs SFI (was Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Michael . Dillon]

> Time to quote Geoff Huston one more time.
> 
> "A true peer relationship is based on the supposition that either party 
> can terminate the interconnection relationship and that the other party 
> does not consider such an action a competitively hostile act. If one 
> party has a high reliance on the interconnection arrangement and the 
> other does not, then the most stable business outcome is that this 
> reliance is expressed in terms of a service contract with the other 
> party, and a provider/client relationship is established"

Those people less versed in the art of peering may
not understand why the peer who has been disconnected
does not consider the action to be competitively hostile.

Simply put, in a true peer relationship, the party who
terminates the interconnection is shooting themselves
in the foot and inflicting as much commercial pain on
themselves as they are inflicting on their peer. The
reason that it is not "competitively" hostile is because
it does not increase the ability of either peer to
compete. Rather, it damages both of them equally because
true peers are equals to begin with.

As vijay points out, this whole issue is not really about
true peering because such equality between peering partners
is rare. It's really about the business case for settlement
free interconnect and that is rather more complex than 
merely the choice between "free" traffic exchange and
paid transit.

--Michael Dillon

P.S. would the Internet be worse off if all traffic 
exchange was paid for and there was no settlement
free interconnect at all? I.e. paid peering, paid
full transit and paid partial transit on the menu?

Fw: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Michael . Dillon]

> While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old 
> wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by 
> routing any packets that used to go directly from Cogent to Level 3 
> though some 3rd (and) 4th (and) 5th set of providers that are connected 
> in some fashion to both...

It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
that is likely what would happen. Of course, there are a few downsides
to running RIP on the open Internet as well...

Today's Internet is a few generations beyond what Paul Baran 
originally conceived and the policy and politics of
business does tend to gum up the works a bit now that
there is no serious threat of global nuclear war.

--Michael Dillon

Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering

[tony sarendal]

Is being a tier-1 now a good or bad sales argument when selling
internet access ?

--
Tony Sarendal - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
IP/Unix
   -= The scorpion replied,
   "I couldn't help it, it's my nature" =-

Re: Turkey has switched Root-Servers

[Evren Demirkan]

Ehehe..Thats  really good answer..
On 10/6/05, Stephane Bortzmeyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 09:19:07AM +0200, Måns Nilsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote a message of 34 lines which said:> .museum is operated from Sweden.
Correct, Europeans will stop using ".com" and switch to ".museum", itsmain competitor :-)

Re: Turkey has switched Root-Servers

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 09:19:07AM +0200,
 MÃ¥ns Nilsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote 
 a message of 34 lines which said:

> .museum is operated from Sweden. 

Correct, Europeans will stop using ".com" and switch to ".museum", its
main competitor :-)

Re: Turkey has switched Root-Servers

[Måns Nilsson]

--On den 28 september 2005 10.03.47 +0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 
> The problem is that all gTLD are controlled only in the US (even more
> than the root is). So, they are international only in name.

.museum is operated from Sweden. 

-- 
Måns NilssonSystems Specialist
+46 70 681 7204   cell  KTHNOC
+46 8 790 6518  office MN1334-RIPE


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