No one behind the wheel at WorldCom

Stephen Stuart stuart at tech.org
Sat Jul 13 19:43:37 UTC 2002


> I beg to differ...
> 
> c/o Tony Bates, UU are only kept off the top spot by Telstra's
> apparent policy of deaggregating!

I don't speak for UUNET, not a shareholder, don't have any say over
their routing policies; that said, there are a couple reasons that
might be the case:

1. Deaggregation to help spread out traffic flow. As someone who used
   to send a lot of traffic toward some big providers, it can be hard
   to balance traffic efficiently when all you get is one short prefix
   at multiple peering points. Having more-specifics, and possibly
   even MEDs that make sense, can help with decisions regarding which
   part of a /9 can be reached best via which peering point. (And
   that's peering as in BGP, not peering as in settlements.)

2. Cut-outs for those pesky dot-coms; you know, the ones with the most
   compelling content on the Internet jumping up and down in your face
   with a need to multi-home their /24 to satisfy the crushing global
   demand for such essentials as "the hamster dance."

I can easily imagine that when you have a lot of customers (as UUNET
is purported to have), you'd have the above two situations in spades,
plus more that we'll no doubt discuss at great length for the next
week.

Let's consider the converse, though - what if AS701 were to suddenly
become a paragon of routing table efficiency, and collapse all their
announcements into one (not possible, I know, but indulge me, please)?

First, some decrease in revenue because all the more-specifics for
multi-homed customers would be preferred over the one big AS701
announcement.

Second, a traffic balancing nightmare as everyone who touches AS701 in
multiple places tries to figure out how to deliver traffic to AS701
efficiently.

While Tony's report certainly indicates that things could be better,
it is also true that they could be a lot worse.

Stephen



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