The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question

Fri Sep 28 23:29:48 UTC 2001

On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Alex Bligh wrote:

> This misses the point, it's not about what you /can/
> afford locally, it's how it's paid for. The problem is
> that the cost implications are suffered
> disproportionately by those not enjoying substantial
> benefit of having the route accepted. You yourself have
> argued that $$ would fix this.

This is assuming your customers are /not/ paying for more
diverse routing choices. There is a correlation between
value (customer's willingness to pay) and route table size
(consider the recent ugliness between C&W and PSI). A route
table of size 0 would have no value. A larger route table
has more value (to the customer), as long it doesn't
noticably impact network performance.

The problem (if there even is one) now is not (yet)
route-table size, it is flapping of /24's. Sean's
progressive dampening is much more appealing than Verio's
filtering, to solve this problem. Filtering needs to be
shelved for the future, if no other alternative method is
found (ie Multi6 mapped to IPv4, etc).

I suspect if customers knew routes were being filtered, they
would care a lot. This only works because it is targetted at
less-noticeable address blocks, and exceptions are made for
noticeable address blocks (major site on a /24's). If
customers knew that this was being done, and there was no
noticeable value created by the change (as is the case now),
they would have a problem. This information probably isn't
included Verio's sales slick, it wouldn't land many sales.

Pete.