Traffic Engineering

Wed Sep 17 18:35:54 UTC 1997

On Wed, Sep 17, 1997 at 10:19:04AM -0700, Kent W. England wrote:
> Here are some examples:
> 
> >     2.  Identify which % of traffic, if any, has regional locality.
> >         For pure Internet traffic, the probability that the source and 
> >         destinatino of traffic are within the same metropolitan area 
> >         tends to be low (10% or lower for metros within the US).  
> 
> This is true only so long as the density of the Internet is low. This is so
> because so long as the density is low, few of your neighbors will be on the
> Internet and therefore local issues are irrelevant. However, at some point,
> the density of the Internet gets to a critical point, say 30% to 40%. At
> that point a pizza parlor owner says to himself "two out of every five of
> my customers are on the Internet. Perhaps I need a web page." And,
> suddenly, pizza on the Net makes a lot of sense and the traffic patterns
> shift. As the density grows to 90%, local traffic becomes dominant over
> distant traffic.

This is happening already, and it pushes one of my buttons _really_
hard.

The geographic locality of reference of the current Internet is
pathetic.  When my telnet session from St Pete to Tampa, Florida, goes
via MAE-East, or worse, MAE-_West_, there's something _seriously_
wrong.

It's my analysis that the problem is that small (T-1 and below)
customers should be buying their connectivity from (and there should
_be_, for them to buy it from) a local exchange-type provider.  IE: buy
a T-3 up hill to, oh, say, the top 6 or 10 backbones, and then sell
transit to local ISPs and IAPs in your geographic area.

This doesn't seem to be technically difficult, and it seems like it
ought to be pretty easy to sell... sure, you're one hop further from
the backbone... but you're now two hops away from _10_.

Sane?  I should be looking for capital?  :-)

Are there any major potholes in this theory that I'm missing?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth       High Technology Systems Consulting              Ashworth
Designer            Linux: Where Do You Want To Fly Today?        & Associates
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jra at baylink.com          http://rc5.distributed.net                  NIC: jra3