[NIC-960209.1757] Routing Problem (fwd)

Wed Feb 14 02:53:45 UTC 1996

Sprint's filtering of routes based on prefix-length has made the popular
press: Communications Week International, Oct.20,1995 (as far as I can
tell from the website).
Please take a look at:

http://techweb.cmp.com/techweb/cwi/current/153newssprint.html

The article unfortunately quotes me completely out of context: I was
never asked by the correspondent in question (Christy Hudgins-Bonafield),
nor informed that I would be quoted, or things would have been portrayed
a little different, as I cannot remember having uttered words
that could be interpreted as

"Schlichting said Sprint's action disrupted an international conference of
 600 government and civilian participants in Kazakhstan late last month."

I am somewhat upset that it took using the new big brother tool
'http://altavista.digital.com' to find this reference , today. Needless to
say, it came up with other interesting digital footprints of my past.

Small fact sheet:

- BelCom was a client of a Sprint reseller at the time, and was not
  victim of Sean's policy, but WOULD have been , if we had been a non-Sprint-
  connected network at the time

- connectivity was impaired by not having an entry of the network (a /22)
  in the routing registries (who was responsible for this remains unclear,
  people at ANS and the Sprint INSC were ultimately helpful with this issue)

- the conference was a great success, the real-IP connectivity was "The"
  killer at the conference. Indeed it was so successful, that we decided
  to present the Internet at the regional Oil&Gas show the week after,
  with DEC's support and contributions (which shall not go umnmentioned here)

Note, that at the time I had full justification for an independent network
number block, as the plan was to multi-home said network in both Moscow
and New York, with growth expections beyond rationality (confirmed by success
and follow-up inquieries resulting from the shows).

BelCom (net worth: $25M) has been decapitated by Comsat Corp. (net: $900M)
since, in what I call a 'corporate crime in progress' : the failure to
successfully usurp BelCom into Comsat's empire has led to an internal 
power-struggle at Comsat, with Beltway-Lions fighting over the control of
a $900M company. Can you say 'chopped heads' , 'body bags' , anyone ?
For control over one billion dollars, people will do anything. I have never
seen people act so ugly in my life. As one of the managers, I am getting
dragged into a mess of lawsuits at this time, with the DC boys and girls
sending gov't agencies my way, the whole charade: if you thought COINTELPRO
was a joke, think again: DC stands for District of Crime, and
Norman Schwartzkopf meant this literally.

In most likeliness, we will see a new chapter of the entire filtering issue
very soon: I am working on a new New York-Moscow IP link for a new company 
at this time: same issues, same story, just a different name.

To Sean Doran: I was rather impressed by your recent statement, call it
commitment to your business: reselling IP wholesale, with the goal of 
preserving functionality of the network as a whole, and a commitment to
what I previously believed to be untrue: not to squeeze the small guys
out of the market with arbitrary new filtering rules. Yet, I think
it's necessary to not follow this policy indefinitely into the future:

- we need faster routers. Cisco does not provide them at this time.
  Where will they come from ? Take a look at the 'gigarouter' (URL lost
  right now): it seems to implement what we have been talking about before:
  a general purpose unix-type engine for route processing, with interface
  cards with memory to hold complete static routing tables. The two
  components talk on a separate bus with each other, both can be upgraded
  independently. MCI uses them for the experimental vBNS.

- IPv6 will not solve aggregation issues the way we would like to see it:
  we will see a greater trade-off for non-optimal routes (number of hops,
  length) in favour of more aggregation, though. What is growing faster:
  link speed, or processing power ? We all know the answer.

In the end, engineering will prevail over filtering, and when this is
reality, I expect the route filtering to disappear: if it doesn't,
it will go the way 800 numbers have gone: it took a significant change
in technology to accomplish number portability, but it was done because
the customers wanted it, and because AT&T (rightfully) feared to lose
a lot of business, yet had to cave in to external pressure, and to
Judge Greene.

If you don't want to see the equivalent of Judge Greene on the Internet,
you (major NSPs) will soon dedicate significant resources to solving
the problems mentioned here.

bye,Kai

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kai Schlichting
Independent Telecommunications Consultant
Internet Consultancy : Cisco, Livingston, BSDI, SunOS, Linux spoken here
New York City, NY
kai at netcom.com