Ungodly packet loss rates

Wed Oct 23 18:20:22 UTC 1996

At 12:33 10/23/96, Robert Laughlin wrote:
>As one who is living this senerio on a daily basis, I can tell you it's 
>frustrating and upsetting.  We have gone so far as to test the legality 
>of what is happening  (there *must* be someone we can sue <grin>).  Public 
>peering works well these days as the large networks move their traffic 
>off the NAPs, freeing up bandwidth for the mid to smaller networks.
>
>The model that makes sense to me, is for the largest networks to exchange
>traffic through private interconnects, and for them to treat the
>aggregated NAP traffic as another large ISP.  The NAP is then used for the
>2nd tier and smaller providers to exchange traffic with each other, as
>well as a collection point to gather up traffic for the large networks.

Interesting model: presuming that the "aggregating exchange point"
had a sizable backbone and could engage in shortest exit routing, 
there's no reason why it shouldn't work.  Of course, a _single_ 
exchange point can't meaningfully provide any benefit of shortest
exit routing, and would probably be treated as an extremely large
volume customer.

/John