BBN Peering issues

Wed Aug 12 22:26:51 UTC 1998

Thus spake Michael Dillon <michael at memra.com> on Wed, Aug 12, 1998:
> On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Nathan Stratton wrote:
> 
> > > What I would like more than anything right now is some official word from
> > > high-up's at BBN regarding what this policy entails exactly, and what
> > > their rationale is behind it.  
> 
> Here is a news story from yesterday with quotes from John Curran
> http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/980810h.html
> 
> > You know what is behind it, you mentioned it two paragraphs below,
> > capitalism. BBN can make more money this way. 
> 
> That is yet to be seen. If this move reduces the quality of connectivity
> for their customers they could lose a lot of business too.

Hey! I'm an ISP too! When do I get my free BBN peering??!?! You mean I've been
paying for BBN all this time? Jeez, I feel dumb...

>From the article:
>                    "It appears that the result of this action will
>                     harm BBN and its customers substantially more
>                     than it will harm our customers," said Exodus
>                     President Ellen Hancock in an Aug. 5 letter to
>                     customers. 

This statement is deluded to say the least. BBN peers with most other major
backbone providers, and they have one of the fastest, most reliable networks in
the world. Say Ms. Hancock ends up buying transit from Digex or UUnet. Under
most current hot-potato routing schemes, that carrier will drop the packet at
the closest BBN peering point, and the web page will continue on its merry way
through BBN to the BBN customer. Three or four more hops added at the max. It
probably wouldn't even be noticeable.

If she buys transit from a not-so-well-connected provider, crappy performance
will be universal and not confined to BBN, ass-uming there's no spiteful
routing policies inserted on her end for BBN customers. (Route all BBN-bound
packets through the BRI link to spitoon.net?) Somehow I doubt that will be the 
case.

Exodus *does* face some hard business decisions. Unfortunately, blaming BBN
isn't going to do much to help Exodus. Capitalists trashing capitalism? Please.

--
John Butler, Network Engineer, Mindspring Enterprises Operations Dept
web toys at http://www.mindspring.com/~fez  mailto:fez at mindspring.net
************************ Beware of people who "celebrate" themselves.