Chinese bgp metering story

Sat Dec 19 04:09:32 UTC 2009

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Jonny Martin <jonny at pch.net> wrote:
> On Dec 19, 2009, at 1:47 AM, Fred Baker wrote:
..
> modified if need be - to achieve this.  Mixing billing with the reachability
> information signalled through BGP just doesn't seem like a good idea.

Indeed not..  but it might offer one advantage, if  it was mandatory
for any such tarrif/cost to be advertised there to be valid, and  in
the form of an  ancillary BGP route attribute,  rather than buried in
some  500,000 page  treaty that forces all ISPs to decipher it and
try to figure out what their liabilities are.

Mainly because it makes any tarrif very visible, and easily understood.
and offers an easy ability to automatically make decisions like
discard reachability information that has any billing labels or
"strings" attached to it, or has a cost greater than $X per million
packets  listed for 'source'...  and easily allows an ISP to  replace
the  next hop with null  when a tarrif option has been listed, or use
only a route not subject to tarrif.

Thus treating as unroutable or permit routing around any transit that
would like to try to taint its routes by indicating  tarrif  to
peers.    And thus  also permitting the whole notion of  'IP tarrif'
to see a very quick death...

Otherwise,  new router hardware could more easily provide suitable
counters and IPFIX data (with suitable changes to ip flow export
formats) to track the tarrifs due to all  "tarrif payee IDs",  or
whatever that would be.

--
-J