Re: do not filter your customers
1. Make your customers register routes, then filter them. (may be time for big providers to put routing tools into open source for the good of the community - make it less hard?) 2. Implement the 1-hop hack to protect your BGP peering. 98% of problem solved on the Internet today 3. Implement a # of routes-type filter to make your peers (and transit customers) phone you if they really do want to add 500,000 routes to your session ( or the wrong set of YouTube routes...). 99.9% of problem solved. 4. Implement BGP-Sec 99.91% of this problem solved. Because #1 is 'just too hard' and because #4 is just too sexy as an academic pursuit we all suffer the consequences. It's a shame that tier one peering agreements didn't evolve with a 'filter your customers' clause (aka do the right thing) as well as a 'like for like' (similar investments) clause in them. I'm not downplaying the BGP-SEC work, I think it's valid and may one day save us from some smart bunny who wants to make a name for himself by bringing the Internet to a halt. I don't believe that's what we're battling here. We're battling the operational cost of doing the right thing with the toolset we have versus waiting for a utopian solution (foolproof and free) that may never come. jy ps. my personal view. On 25/02/2012, at 6:26 AM, Danny McPherson da...@tcb.net wrote: On Feb 24, 2012, at 1:10 PM, Steven Bellovin wrote: But just because we can't solve the whole problem, does that mean we shouldn't solve any of it? Nope, we most certainly should decompose the problem into addressable elements, that's core to engineering and operations. However, simply because the currently envisaged solution doesn't solve this problem doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge it exists. The IETF's BGP security threats document [1] describes a threat model for BGP path security, which constrains itself to the carefully worded SIDR WG charter, which addresses route origin authorization and AS_PATH semantics -- i.e., this leak problem is expressly out of scope of a threats document discussing BGP path security - eh? How the heck we can talk about BGP path security and not consider this incident a threat is beyond me, particularly when it happens by accident all the time. How we can justify putting all that BGPSEC and RPKI machinery in place and not address this leak issue somewhere in the mix is, err.., telling. Alas, I suspect we can all agree that experiments are good and the market will ultimately decide. -danny [1] draft-ietf-sidr-bgpsec-threats-02
Re: personal backup
On 13/08/2011, at 3:12 PM, Randy Bush ra...@psg.com wrote: charles skipped what i see as a highly critical question, personal backup. my life is on a 13 macbook air, all data, mail back decades (i do not save all mail), etc. the whole drive is encrypted, my main reason for moving to lion. i have two time machine drives, one at home and one i carry on the road. both are encrypted. belt and braces, i also use unison to sync my laptop's home data to a server in colo. it goes to a freebsd geli, i.e. encrypted, partition. all keys and other critical private data are in a text file on my laptop encrypted with gpg, which i use emacs crypt++ to access. that key file, a bunch of x.509 certs, ... are copied to an ironkey usb. randy I found the mobile account/portable home directory feature in os x server to be very useful for wife and kids (powerbooks). They get backed up and don't realize. If they crash a drive or if i upgrade a machine I just log them back in and resynch the machine. no more lost homework. jy
Re: OSPF vs IS-IS
That's interesting and if true would represent a real change. Can you list the larger SPs in the US that use OSPF? jy On 12/08/2011, at 10:40 PM, James Jones ja...@freedomnet.co.nz wrote: I would not say ISIS is the prefered protocol. Most service providers I have worked with use OSPF. Most networks outside of the US use it from what I have seen and the larger SPs in the US do too. There must be a reason for that. Sent from my iPhone On Aug 12, 2011, at 8:23 AM, CJ cjinfant...@gmail.com wrote: You guys are making a lot of good points. I will check into the Doyle book to formulate an opinion. So, I am completely new to the SP environment and OSPF is what I have learned because I have ever only had experience in the enterprise. It seems that from this discussion, IS-IS is still a real, very viable option. So, IS-IS being preferred...realistically, what is the learning curve? CJ On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 7:57 AM, jim deleskie deles...@gmail.com wrote: If a network is big enough big / complex enough that you really need to worry about performance of mesh groups or tweaking areas then its big enough that having a noc eng page you out at 2am when there is an issue doesn't really scale. I'm all for ISIS, if I was to build a network from scratch I'd likely default to it. I'm just say, new features or performance aside the knowledge of your team under you will have much more impact on how your network runs then probably any other factor. I've seen this time and time again when 'new tech' has been introduced into networks, from vendors to protocols. Most every time with engineers saying we have smart people they will learn it / adjust. Almost every case of that turned into 6 mts of crap for both ops and eng while the ops guys became clueful in the new tech, but as a friend frequently says Your network, your choice. -jim On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Jeffrey S. Young yo...@jsyoung.net wrote: On 12/08/2011, at 12:08 AM, CJ cjinfant...@gmail.com wrote: Awesome, I was thinking the same thing. Most experience is OSPF so it only makes sense. That is a good tip about OSPFv3 too. I will have to look more deeply into OSPFv3. Thanks, -CJ On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 9:34 AM, jim deleskie deles...@gmail.com wrote: Having run both on some good sized networks, I can tell you to run what your ops folks know best. We can debate all day the technical merits of one v another, but end of day, it always comes down to your most jr ops eng having to make a change at 2 am, you need to design for this case, if your using OSPF today and they know OSPF I'd say stick with it to reduce the chance of things blowing up at 2am when someone tries to 'fix' something else. -jim On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 10:29 AM, William Cooper wcoope...@gmail.com wrote: I'm totally in concurrence with Stephan's point. Couple of things to consider: a) deciding to migrate to either ISIS or OSPFv3 from another protocol is still migrating to a new protocol and b) even in the case of migrating to OSPFv3, there are fairly significant changes in behavior from OSPFv2 to be aware of (most notably authentication, but that's fodder for another conversation). -Tony This topic is a 'once a month' on NANOG, I'm sure we could check the archives for some point-in-time research but I'm curious to learn if anyone maintains statistics? It would be interesting to see statistics on how many service providers run either protocol. IS-IS has, for some years, been the de facto choice for SP's and as a result the vendor and standardisation community 'used to' develop SP features more often for IS-IS. IS-IS was, therefore, more 'mature' than OSPF for SP's. I wonder if this is still the case? For me, designing an IGP with IS-IS is much easier than it is with OSPF. Mesh groups are far easier to plan (more straightforward) easier to change than OSPF areas. As for junior noc staff touching much of anything to do with an ISP's IGP at 2am, wake me up instead. jy -- CJ http://convergingontheedge.com http://www.convergingontheedge.com
Re: OSPF vs IS-IS
On 13/08/2011, at 10:48 PM, Randy Bush ra...@psg.com wrote: That's interesting and if true would represent a real change. Can you list the larger SPs in the US that use OSPF? att is-is in ntt, sprint, verizon, ... randy ATT's backbone is the old SBC backbone? Finding OSPF here doesn't surprise me. If Level3 is really OSPF I would be pretty surprised, most of the clue @L3 came from iMCI (a big IS-IS shop). jy
Re: OSPF vs IS-IS
On 12/08/2011, at 12:08 AM, CJ cjinfant...@gmail.com wrote: Awesome, I was thinking the same thing. Most experience is OSPF so it only makes sense. That is a good tip about OSPFv3 too. I will have to look more deeply into OSPFv3. Thanks, -CJ On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 9:34 AM, jim deleskie deles...@gmail.com wrote: Having run both on some good sized networks, I can tell you to run what your ops folks know best. We can debate all day the technical merits of one v another, but end of day, it always comes down to your most jr ops eng having to make a change at 2 am, you need to design for this case, if your using OSPF today and they know OSPF I'd say stick with it to reduce the chance of things blowing up at 2am when someone tries to 'fix' something else. -jim On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 10:29 AM, William Cooper wcoope...@gmail.com wrote: I'm totally in concurrence with Stephan's point. Couple of things to consider: a) deciding to migrate to either ISIS or OSPFv3 from another protocol is still migrating to a new protocol and b) even in the case of migrating to OSPFv3, there are fairly significant changes in behavior from OSPFv2 to be aware of (most notably authentication, but that's fodder for another conversation). -Tony This topic is a 'once a month' on NANOG, I'm sure we could check the archives for some point-in-time research but I'm curious to learn if anyone maintains statistics? It would be interesting to see statistics on how many service providers run either protocol. IS-IS has, for some years, been the de facto choice for SP's and as a result the vendor and standardisation community 'used to' develop SP features more often for IS-IS. IS-IS was, therefore, more 'mature' than OSPF for SP's. I wonder if this is still the case? For me, designing an IGP with IS-IS is much easier than it is with OSPF. Mesh groups are far easier to plan (more straightforward) easier to change than OSPF areas. As for junior noc staff touching much of anything to do with an ISP's IGP at 2am, wake me up instead. jy
Re: NANOGers home data centers - What's in your closet?
On 13/08/2011, at 11:08 AM, Leo Bicknell bickn...@ufp.org wrote: Beyond that, a nice home file server, rsynced to something in a real data center each night. This a combo of backup plus high speed access no matter which side of the home connection you are on. I currently use a PC I built myself, which is good, but I would like something that uses less power. I'm looking hard at a Mac Mini server, with an external RAID (perhaps 2x3TB drives, RAID 1) as I think it will draw even less power, but I'm not sure yet. You might notice a trend with me, low power, which means low heat output and long runtime on UPS, fanless so no noise, small footprint. Gotta have GigE to every room wired for desktops, printers, cameras, TV's, playstations, etc. Netgear 5 port switches are awesome, lifetime warranty, small, cheap. The holy grail I'm searching for now? A GigE switch with POE, unmanaged is ok, and probably preferred from a price perspective; but with NO FAN. We moved overseas and power/space/cooling is harder to provide so out with all of the rack-mount gear, in with the efficient and small stuff. I had a 42U rack at home full of various kit that I'd collected. Much of the rack mount went to work where I've squirreled it in to a closet and use it to archive my mail -- much cleaner solution than the crap (Exchange with mandatory automated archiving) that IT provides. @home: X-Serves running OS X Server became Mac Mini's without much fuss. Rackmount Cisco 35xx's became 3560's (fan less) and I added a small Netgear GigE switch. Moved away from the Nokia IP380 running pFsense and back to a Soekris. By far my favorite addition was a used QNAP from Ebay. 6 Bays - holds 4 x 2TB drives currently and has my movies, music, laptop backups, family pictures, and so forth... QNAP client for the iPad has saved many a fight over the TV. Still working on the Asterisk server to power the VoIP phones -- moving from a 4U rack mount intel to a dedicated G4 mac mini. Also bought a Intel Solo Mac Mini for cheap and upgraded the processor to a 2.33Ghz Intel Duo -- fun project and dedicated the box to PLEX in the media center. jy
Re: Yup; the Internet is screwed up.
On 23/06/2011, at 8:07 AM, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: Be that as it may, I don't think current methods and techniques in use = will scale well to fully replace antennas, satellite and cable to = provide tv and radio signals. =20 (remembering for example the recent discussion about multicast) =20 They won't, but, that's not what consumers think about when they decide = where to get their content. Consumers look at convenience, cost, and availability. In some cases, = quality also enters the picture. It's interesting in an Innovator's Dilemma sort of way. Consumers are moving from time-based consumption to time-shifted consumption. As (we) technologists finds ways to bring the market what it wants in a cost-effective manner the old methods to deliver content are eclipsed. If we can scale to deliver the majority of content from the big hard drive in the sky the market for cable and television's linear programming signals goes away. It's hard for me to think that radio will be eclipsed (but with LTE and iCloud, perhaps even that is possible). As the methods to deliver content change so will the paradigms and the descriptive language. How many kids know what an LP is? How many of their kids will understand what a time-slot is? How many will lose their favorite program because it was cancelled by the network -- will programs vie for real eyeballs rather than places in a fall lineup? Will blanket ads be replaced by the household's Google Profile and what was a Neilsen rating anyway? Our jobs are going to depend on finding ways to scale infrastructure for the convenience of others. I don't think the Internet is screwed up it's just reached the point of inflection after which it will scale based on convenience. Broadcast and multicast are much more efficient ways of video delivery than unicast IP, but then the PSTN was a perfectly good system, who needs cellular or VoIP? jy
Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company
On 19/05/2011, at 6:01 AM, Holmes,David A dhol...@mwdh2o.com wrote: I think this shows the need for an Internet-wide multicast implementation. Although I can recall working on a product that delivered satellite multicast streams (with each multicast group corresponding to individual TV stations) to telco CO's. This enabled the telco to implement multicast at the edge of their networks, where user broadband clients would issue multicast joins only as far as the CO. If I recall this was implemented with the old Cincinnati Bell telco. I admit there are a lot of CO's and cable head-ends though for this solution to scale. -Original Message- From: Michael Holstein [mailto:michael.holst...@csuohio.edu] Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 12:46 PM To: Roy Cc: nanog Subject: Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company http://e.businessinsider.com/public/184962 Somebody should invent a a way to stream groups of shows simultaneously and just arrange for people to watch the desired stream at a particular time. Heck, maybe even do it wireless. problem solved, right? Cheers, Michael Holstein Cleveland State University No matter where you go, there you are. [--anon?] or Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. - [heavily paraphrased -- Santayana] jy
Re: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?
On 08/05/2011, at 4:10 PM, Michael Dillon wavetos...@googlemail.com wrote: Many years ago I was the MCI side of the Real Broadcast Network. Real Networks arranged to broadcast a Rolling Stones concert. We had the ability to multicast on the Mbone and unicast from Real Networks caches. We figured that we'd get a hit rate of 70% multicast (those who wanted to see the event as it happened) and 30% unicast (those who would wait and watch it later). You do realize that unicast from Real Networks caches *IS* multicast, just not IP Multicast. Akamai runs a very large and successful multicast network which shows that there is great demand for multicast services, just not the low level kind provided by IP Multicast. In fact, the most important use for IP Multicast is to work around the problem of the best route. In the financial industry, they don't want their traffic to take the best route, because that creates a chain of single points of failure. So instead, they build two multicast trees, send a copy of each packet into each tree, and arrange that the paths which the trees use are entirely separate. That means separacy of circuits and routers and switches. -- Michael Dillon In 1997, Real Networks caches were sending unicast. If they now operate differently I'm not aware (Real dumped the relationship in the DSL heyday to chase eyeballs -- iMCI was a backbone). But you've got one over on me, I've never heard of Akamai's multicast and given that they don't run a backbone to my knowledge it sounds as if they're using their server installs to route packets or have an interesting way of source routing or tunneling multiple streams of the same data through ISP networks. As for the financial industry I was only aware of some of the reliable mcast software in use to push ticker information to trading desks. All very interesting but the point was that the world of entertainment video consumption has long since become on-demand; many of the points being made for the use of IP multicast as a pseudo-broadcast mechanism have been made before (and will be made again). I personally think P2P is a much more interesting topic for (legally) distributing video these days and P4P may even solve the inter provider problem that multicast never seemed to crack. jy
Re: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?
On 04/05/2011, at 1:54 AM, George Bonser gbon...@seven.com wrote: Multicast is an elegant solution to a dwindling problem set. And that is fundamentally where we disagree. I see this as not elegant at all. It is a fundamental part of the protocol suite. It is no more elegant than unicast. I also believe that it will be the wireless operators that bring this back to widespread use as wireless devices are used for more than simply placing phone calls. Time will tell, but it looks like the total use of multicast for content delivery is currently increasing. It just isn't increasing in the realm of home internet providers, yet, but I believe it will as people use home internet for things that they had traditionally used other services for such as broadcast radio and tv. I dunno, I think it's elegant, in think Deering did an incredible job to create it and some many years ago I played a role to bring multicast to the Internet at large. I believed that multicast would play a huge role in the delivery of content, then. Trouble was that the way that people want to consume video means most of it is time-shifted. Folks in charge of networks didn't understand the technology and marketing people thought turning on multicast meant giving something away. I finally settled on the notion that multicast is a tool for service providers/enterprises to use but that it wouldn't ever be as pervasive as I'd hoped. As for wireless operators? The wireless medium itself is a broadcast network, why bother with multicast? jy
Re: How do you put a TV station on the Mbone? (was: Royal Wedding...)
On 30/04/2011, at 5:44 AM, John Levine jo...@iecc.com wrote: Delivering multicast to end users is fundamentally not hard. The biggest issue seems to be with residential CPE (pretty much the same problem as IPv6, really). Well, more than that, since I don't really want my DSL pipe saturated with TV that I'm not watching, you need some way for the CPE to tell the ISP send me stream N I suppose with some sort of spanning three thing it'd even be posssible to do that at multuple levels, so the streams are only fed to people who have clients for it. R's, John Or your set top box... multicast joins from STB to DSLAM aren't so hard. ATT U-Verse has been doing it for more than five years now. jy
Re: The growth of municipal broadband networks
On 27/03/2011, at 6:35 PM, Michael Painter tvhaw...@shaka.com wrote: Owen DeLong wrote: On Mar 26, 2011, at 11:36 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Owen DeLong o...@delong.com As such, I'm sure that such a move would be vocally opposed by the current owners of the LMI who enjoy leveraging it to extort monopolistic pricing from substandard services. As I noted, yes, that's Verizontal, and they have apparently succeeded in lobbying to have it made *illegal* in several states. I don't have citations to hand, but there are a couple sites that track muni fiber; I can find some. Cheers, -- jra Laws can be changed if we can get enough momentum behind doing the right thing. Owen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture While I agree that laws can and should be changed and I agree that the USA's telco privatization scheme no longer fits the pace of technology, those who believe have a long way toward momentum. Those of us who believe in a muni or a national broadband infrastructure are opposed by a mountain of money (to be made) and an army of lawyers. For instance, when this army couldn't hope to have muni networking outlawed on a national basis they turned to each state legislature. They're ticking off the states one by one: http://www.cybertelecom.org/broadband/muni.htm jy
Re: Regional AS model
Multiple AS, one per region, is about extracting maximum revenue from your client base. In 2000 we had no technical reason to do it, I can't see a technical reason to do it today. This is a layer 8/9 issue. jy On 25/03/2011, at 5:42 AM, Zaid Ali z...@zaidali.com wrote: I have seen age old discussions on single AS vs multiple AS for backbone and datacenter design. I am particularly interested in operational challenges for running AS per region e.g. one AS for US, one EU etc or I have heard folks do one AS per DC. I particularly don't see any advantage in doing one AS per region or datacenter since most of the reasons I hear is to reduce the iBGP mesh. I generally prefer one AS and making use of confederation. Zaid
Re: Regional AS model
While it's a very interesting read and it's always nice to know what Danny is up to, the concept is a pretty extreme corner case when you consider the original question. I took the original question to be about global versus regional AS in a provider backbone. On the other hand if we'd had this capability years ago the notion of a CDN based on anycasting would be viable in a multi-provider environment. Maybe time to revive that idea? jy On 25/03/2011, at 8:45 AM, David Conrad d...@virtualized.org wrote: On Mar 24, 2011, at 11:08 AM, Jeffrey S. Young wrote: Multiple AS, one per region, is about extracting maximum revenue from your client base. In 2000 we had no technical reason to do it, I can't see a technical reason to do it today. This is a layer 8/9 issue. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mcpherson-unique-origin-as-00 Regards, -drc
Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
On 20/12/2010, at 12:25 AM, JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com wrote: On 19/12/10 8:31 PM, Chris Adams wrote: Once upon a time, JC Dilljcdill.li...@gmail.com said: Why not open up the market for telco wiring and just see what happens? There might be 5 or perhaps even 10 players who try to enter the market, but there won't be 50 - it simply won't make financial sense for additional players to try to enter the market after a certain number of players are already in. Look up pictures of New York City in the early days of electricty. There were streets where you couldn't hardly see the sky because of all the wires on the poles. Can you provide a link to a photo of this situation? And there certainly won't be 50 all trying to service the same neighborhood. And there's the other half of the problem. Without franchise agreements that require (mostly) universal service, you'd get 50 companies trying to serve the richest neighborhoods in town, No you wouldn't. Remember those diminishing returns. At most you would likely have 4 or 5. If you are player 6 you aren't going to spend the money to build out in an area where there are 5 other players already - you will build out in a different neighborhood where there are only 2 or 3 players. Then, later, you might buy out the weakest of the 5 players in the rich neighborhood to gain access to that neighborhood when player 5 is on the verge of going BK. It's also silly to think that being player 6 to build out in a richer neighborhood would be a good move. The rich like to get a good deal just like everyone else. (They didn't *get* rich by spending their money unwisely.) As an example, I will point people to the neighborhood between Page Mill Road and Stanford University, an area originally built out as housing for Stanford professors. They have absolutely awful broadband options in that area. They have been *begging* for someone to come in with a better option. This is a very wealthy community (by US national standards) with median family incomes in the 6 figures according to the 2000 census data. Right now they can only get slow and expensive DSL or slightly faster and also expensive cable service. The city of Palo Alto has sonet fiber running right along the edges of this neighborhood. (see, http://poulton.net/ftth/slides.ps.pdf slide 18.) It's a perfect place for an ISP to put in a junction box and build a local fiber network to connect these homes with fiber to the Palo Alto fiber. But apparently the regulatory obstacles make it too complicated. THAT is what I'm talking about above. Since the incumbents don't want to provide improved services, get rid of those obstacles, let new players move in and put in service without so many obstacles. jc Having lived through the telecom bubble (as many of us did) what makes you believe that player 6 is going to know about the financial conditions of players 1-5? What if player two has a high-profile chief scientist who, on a speaking circuit, starts telling the market that his bandwidth demands are growing at the rate of 300% per year and players 6-10 jump into the market with strong financial backing? While I believe in free-market economics and I will agree with you that the situation will eventually sort itself out; thousands of ditch-diggers and poll-climbers will lose their jobs, but this is the way of things. I do not agree that the end-consumer should be put through this fiasco and I am confident that the money spent digging more ditches and stringing more ugly overhead cables would be better spent on layers 3 and more importantly on services at layers 4-7. My perception of the current situation in the USA? We have just gone through an era in which the FCC and administration defined competition as having more than one provider able to provide service (200 kb/s or better) within a zip code. A zip code can cover quite a large area. This left the major players to their own devices and we saw them overbuild TV and broadband services into the more lucrative areas (because as established providers they actually do have a pretty good idea of the financial condition of their competitors within an area). Quite often 'lucrative' did not equal affluent, lucrative is more a measure of consumption (think VoD) than median household income. The point is that the free-market evolution of broadband has produced a patchwork of services that is hard to decipher and even harder to influence. The utopian solution (pun intended) would be to develop a local, state, federal system of broadband similar to the highway system of roads. Let those broadband providers who can compete by creating layer 3 backbones and services at layers 4-7 (and layer 1-2 with wireless) survive. Let the innovation continue at layers 4-7 without constant saber-rattling from the layer 1-2 providers. And as a byproduct we can stop
Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
On 20/12/2010, at 1:22 PM, JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com wrote: On 20/12/10 9:19 AM, Jeffrey S. Young wrote: Having lived through the telecom bubble (as many of us did) what makes you believe that player 6 is going to know about the financial conditions of players 1-5? What if player two has a high-profile chief scientist who, on a speaking circuit, starts telling the market that his bandwidth demands are growing at the rate of 300% per year and players 6-10 jump into the market with strong financial backing? While I believe in free-market economics and I will agree with you that the situation will eventually sort itself out; thousands of ditch-diggers and poll-climbers will lose their jobs, but this is the way of things. Apples and oranges. The telcom bubble didn't involve building out *to the home*. The cost to build a data center and put in modems or lease dry copper for DSL is dramatically lower than the cost to build out to the home. It was financially feasible (even if not the best decision, especially if you based the decision on a provably false assumption on market growth) to be player 6 in the early days of the Internet, it's not financially feasible to be player 6 to build out fiber to the home. I do not agree that the end-consumer should be put through this fiasco and I am confident that the money spent digging more ditches and stringing more ugly overhead cables would be better spent on layers 3 and more importantly on services at layers 4-7. The problem is getting fair access to layer 1 for all players. If it takes breaking the monopoly rules for putting in layer 1 facilities to get past this log jam, then that may be the solution. The utopian solution (pun intended) would be to develop a local, state, federal system of broadband similar to the highway system of roads. Let those broadband providers who can compete by creating layer 3 backbones and services at layers 4-7 (and layer 1-2 with wireless) survive. Let the innovation continue at layers 4-7 without constant saber-rattling from the layer 1-2 providers. But how do we GET there? I don't see a good path, as the ILECs who own the layer 1 infrastructure have already successfully lobbied for laws and policies that allow them to maintain their monopoly use of the layer 1 facilities to the customer's location. And as a byproduct we can stop the ridiculous debate on Net Neutrality which is molded daily by telecom lobbyists. Yes, that would be nice. But where's a feasible path to this ultimate goal? jc the point of the bubble analogy had more to do with poor speculation driving poor investments than it had to do with the nature of the build outs. I don't really think it would be far-fetched to see it happen again in broadband (perhaps in a better economy), but then it's only my opinion, everyone has them. the deeper point I was trying to make: all of this (the market evolution) has a detrimental effect on the Internet-consuming public and while the rest of world leads the USA in broadband deployment (pick any category) we debate, lag, and are currently driving policies that only further the patchwork of deployment and ineffective service we already have. jy
Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
one of the most interesting things about coming to Australia (after working in the USA telecom industry for 20 years) was the opportunity to see such a proposal (the NBN) put into practice. who knows if the NBN will be quite what everyone hopes, but the premise is sound, the last mile is a natural monopoly. I believe that 'competition' in the last mile is a red herring that simply maintains the status quo (which for many broadband consumers is woefully inadequate). I agree with you that the USA has too many lobbyists to ever put such a proposal in place, the telecoms in a large number of states have even limited or prevented municipalities from creating their own solutions, consumers have no hope. one has to wonder how different the telecom world might have been in the USA if a layer 1 - layer 2/3 separation was proposed instead of the att breakup and modified judgement jy On 19/12/2010, at 8:48 PM, Richard A Steenbergen r...@e-gerbil.net wrote: On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 08:20:49PM -0500, Bryan Fields wrote: The government granting a monopoly is the problem, and more lame government regulation is not the solution. Let everyone compete on a level playing field, not by allowing one company to buy a monopoly enforced by men with guns. Running a wire to everyone's house is a natural monopoly. It just doesn't make sense, financially or technically, to try and manage 50 different companies all trying to install 50 different wires into every house just to have competition at the IP layer. It also wouldn't make sense to have 5 different competing water companies trying to service your house, etc. This is where government regulation of the entities who ARE granted the monopoly status comes into play, to protect consumers against abuses like we're seeing Comcast commit today. Personally I think the right answer is to enforce a legal separation between the layer 1 and layer 3 infrastructure providers, and require that the layer 1 network provide non-discriminatory access to any company who wishes to provide IP to the end user. But that would take a lot of work to implement, and there are billions of dollars at work lobbying against it, so I don't expect it to happen any time soon. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen r...@e-gerbil.net http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On 17/12/2010, at 1:17 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: Original Message - From: JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com On 17/12/10 4:54 AM, Carlos Martinez-Cagnazzo wrote: I do believe that video over the Internet is about to change the cable business in a very deep and possibly traumatic way. +1 It's clear that this is a major driving factor in the Comcast/L3/Netflix peering/transit issue. Comcast is obviously looking for ways to fill the looming hole in their revenue chart as consumers turn off Cable and get their TV/video entertainment delivered via the internet. The more I look at this, the more it looks like pharmaceuticals bought from Canada are cheaper than ones purchased in America -- and they will be *just as long* as only a minority of Americans buy them there. As soon as *everyone* in America is buying their drugs cross-border, the prices will go right back up to what they were paying here. This is what's gonna happen with Comcast, too; if their customers drop CATV, then they're going to have to raise their prices -- and the cable networks themselves will have *no* way to collect revenue; the cable systems being their collection agent network. This Can't End Well. Cheers, -- jra if the retail price of the content is inflated to support the distribution mechanism (e.g. cable, dsl, fios) and the provider doesn't own the content the result is inevitable. content owners could care less about how the content reaches eyeballs as long as it does so reliably. Comcast/NBC merger in the face of comcast/L3-Netflix fight gets interesting. jy
Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth
t On 26/09/2010, at 6:43 AM, Matthew Walster matt...@walster.org wrote: On 25 September 2010 21:16, Rodrick Brown rodrick.br...@gmail.com wrote: I think most people are aware that the Blizzard World of WarcCraft patcher distributes files through Bittorrent, snip I once read an article talking about making BitTorrent scalable by using anycasted caching services at the ISP's closest POP to the end user. Given sufficient traffic on a specified torrent, the caching device would build up the file, then distribute that direct to the subscriber in the form of an additional (preferred) peer. Similar to a CDN or Usenet, but where it was cached rather than deliberately pushed out from a locus. Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable for the content cached there? M IMHO, Sooner or later our community will catch on and begin to deploy such technology. P2P is a really elegant 'tool' when used to distribute large files (which we all know). I expect that even the biggest last-mile providers will lose the arms race they currently engage in against this 'tool' and start participating in and controlling the flow of data. Throwing millions into technologies to thwart this 'tool,' technologies such as DPI only takes away from a last-mile provider's ability to offer service. I believe this is one reason the USA lags the Rest of the World in broadband deployment. Ultimately, I believe it will make sense to design last-mile networks to benefit from P2P (e.g. allow end stations to communicate locally rather than force traffic that could stay local to a central office through a session- based router). Then take advantage by deploying a scenario such as the one you've outlined to keep swarms local. Before we do that though, we need to cut the paranoia about this particular tool (created by the RIAA and others) and we need to see a few more exec's with vision. jy
Re: off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History
MCI and BT had a long courtship. BT left MCI standing at the altar after neighborhoodMCI (a consumer last mile play) announced $400M in losses, twice. WorldCom swooped in after that. jy On 12/08/2010, at 12:12 PM, jim deleskie deles...@gmail.com wrote: CIP went with BT (Concert) I still clearly remember the very long concall when we separated it from it BIPP connections. :) -jim On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Chris Boyd cb...@gizmopartners.com wrote: On Aug 11, 2010, at 1:13 PM, John Lee wrote: MCI bought MFS-Datanet because MCI had the customers and MFS-Datanet had all of the fiber running to key locations at the time and could drastically cut MCI's costs. UUNET merged with MCI and their traffic was put on this same network. MCI went belly up and Verizon bought the network. Although not directly involved in the MCI Internet operations, I read all the announcements that came across the email when I worked at MCI from early 1993 to late 1998. My recollection is that Worldcom bought out MFS. UUnet was a later acquisition by the Worldcom monster (no, no biases here :-). While this was going on MCI was building and running what was called the BIPP (Basic IP Platform) internally. That product was at least reasonably successful, enough so that some gummint powers that be required divestiture of the BIPP from the company that would come out of the proposed acquisition of MCI by Worldcom. The regulators felt that Worldcom would have too large a share of the North American Internet traffic. The BIPP went with BT IIRC, and I think finally landed in Global Crossing's assets. --Chris
Re: off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History
N3 = new network nodes, BIPP wasn't that great a name either. The ASN was always 3561. jy On 12/08/2010, at 8:20 AM, Benson Schliesser bens...@queuefull.net wrote: On 11 Aug 10, at 2:10 PM, Chris Boyd wrote: My recollection is that Worldcom bought out MFS. UUnet was a later acquisition by the Worldcom monster (no, no biases here :-). While this was going on MCI was building and running what was called the BIPP (Basic IP Platform) internally. That product was at least reasonably successful, enough so that some gummint powers that be required divestiture of the BIPP from the company that would come out of the proposed acquisition of MCI by Worldcom. The regulators felt that Worldcom would have too large a share of the North American Internet traffic. The BIPP went with BT IIRC, and I think finally landed in Global Crossing's assets. Actually, Cable Wireless acquired the BIPP after regulators forced Worldcom to divest one of their networks. CW developed a new network architecture as an evolution of BIPP called N3, based on MPLS as an ATM replacement for TE. (Perhaps somebody that worked at CW back then can comment on N3; I can't recall what it stood for.) After a few years, CW reorganized their American operations into a separate entity, which subsequently went bankrupt. Savvis (my current employer) bought the assets out of bankruptcy court. We then upgraded the N3 network to support better QoS, higher capacity, etc, and call it the ATN (Application Transport Network). The current Savvis core network, AS3561, is thus the evolved offspring of the MCI Internet Services / Internet-MCI network. Of course, before all of this, MCI built the network as a commercial Internet platform in parallel to their ARPA network. That's before my time, unfortunately, so I don't know many details. For instance I'm uncertain how the ASN has changed over the years. Anybody with more history and/or corrections would be appreciated. Cheers, -Benson
Re: off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History
Worldcom bought MFS. Worldcom bought MCI. Worldcom bought UUnet. In your statement s/MCI/Worldcom/g I don't know if UUnet was part of Worldcom when MO first made statements about backbone growth, but I do know that internetMCI was still part of MCI and therefore, MCI was not a part of Worldcom. May seem like splitting hairs to some, but it is important to a few of us to point out that we never worked under Ebbers. Not that we had a choice :-). Growth of the NAPs during this period is a poor indicator of growth. Because of the glitch you mention in carrying capacity the tier 1's all but abandoned the NAPs for peering between themselves and from that point forward (mid '97) preferred direct peering arrangements. jy On 12/08/2010, at 4:13 AM, John Lee j...@internetassociatesllc.com wrote: Andrew, Earlier this week I had a meeting with the ex-Director of the Network Operations Center for MFS-Datanet/MCI whose tenure was through 1999. From 1994 to 1998 they were re-architeching the Frame Relay and ATM networks to handle the growth in traffic including these new facilities called peering points of MAE-East and MAE-West. From roughly 1990 to then end of 1996 they saw traffic on their switches grow at 50-70% growth every 6 months. By the last half of 1996 there was a head of line blocking problem on the DEC FDDI switches that was regularly bringing down the Internet. The architecture had lower traffic circuits were going through concentrators while higher traffic circuits were directly attached to ports on the switchs. MFS-Datanet was not going to take the hit for the interruptions to the Internet and was going to inform the trade press there was a problem with DEC FDDI switches so Digital gave six switches for the re-architecture of the MAEs to solve the problem. Once this problem was solved the first quarter of 1997 saw a 70% jump in traffic that quarter alone. This historical event would in my memory be the genesis of the 100% traffic growth in 100 days legend. (So it was only 70% in 90 days which for the marketing folks does not cut it so 100% in 100 days sounds much better?? :) ) MCI bought MFS-Datanet because MCI had the customers and MFS-Datanet had all of the fiber running to key locations at the time and could drastically cut MCI's costs. UUNET merged with MCI and their traffic was put on this same network. MCI went belly up and Verizon bought the network. Personal Note: from 1983 to 90 I worked for Hayes the modem folks and became the Godfather to Ascend communications with Jeanette, Rob, Jay and Steve whose team produced the TNT line of modem/ISDN to Ethernet central site concentrators (in the early ninties) that drove a large portion of the user traffic to the Internet at the time, generating the bubble. John (ISDN) Lee From: Andrew Odlyzko [odly...@umn.edu] Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 12:55 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth myths Since several members of this list requested it, here is a summary of the responses to my request for information about Internet growth during the telecom bubble, in particular the perceptions of the O'Dell/Sidgmore/WorldCom/UUNet Internet doubling every 100 days myth. First of all, many thanks to all those who responded, on and off-list. This involved extensive correspondence and some long phone conversations, and helped fill out the picture of those very confusing times (and also made it even clearer than before that there were many different perspectives on what was happening). The entire message is rather long, but it is written in sections, to make it easy to get the gist quickly and neglect the rest. Andrew --- 1. Short summary: People who got into the game late, or had been working at small ISPs or other enterprises, were generally willing to give serious credence to the Internet doubling every 100 days tale. The old-timers, especially those who worked for large ISPs or other large corporate establishment or research networks, were convinced by the late 1990s that this tale was false, but did not talk about it publicly, even inside the NANOG community. --- 2. Longer version: The range of views was very wide, and hard to give justice to in full. But there seemed to be two distinct groups, and the consensus views (which obviously exclude quite a few people) appear to have been: 2A: Those who entered the field in the late 1990s, especially if they worked for small ISPs or other small enterprises, tended to regard the claim seriously. (But it should be remarked that hardly anybody devoted too much effort or thought to the claim, they were too busy putting out fires in their own backyards to worry about
Re: off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History
BIPP was sold to CW where it continued to use MCI transmission and facilities. In November 2000, CW had rebuilt it on their own facilities (just a bit larger). Quite soon after the completion of the new network in 2000, CW marketing was forecasting the need for a network that was ten times the size of their current backbone (the new network was four times the size of the original iMCI). CW was chapter 7 within 12 months. BTW: CW sued Worldcom and won a $250M settlement on the basis that MCI had hidden the iMCI sales and marketing team in the sale. The assets of CW were sold to Savvis. jy On 12/08/2010, at 5:10 AM, Chris Boyd cb...@gizmopartners.com wrote: On Aug 11, 2010, at 1:13 PM, John Lee wrote: MCI bought MFS-Datanet because MCI had the customers and MFS-Datanet had all of the fiber running to key locations at the time and could drastically cut MCI's costs. UUNET merged with MCI and their traffic was put on this same network. MCI went belly up and Verizon bought the network. Although not directly involved in the MCI Internet operations, I read all the announcements that came across the email when I worked at MCI from early 1993 to late 1998. My recollection is that Worldcom bought out MFS. UUnet was a later acquisition by the Worldcom monster (no, no biases here :-). While this was going on MCI was building and running what was called the BIPP (Basic IP Platform) internally. That product was at least reasonably successful, enough so that some gummint powers that be required divestiture of the BIPP from the company that would come out of the proposed acquisition of MCI by Worldcom. The regulators felt that Worldcom would have too large a share of the North American Internet traffic. The BIPP went with BT IIRC, and I think finally landed in Global Crossing's assets. --Chris
