No one behind the wheel at WorldCom

Sat Jul 13 21:12:09 UTC 2002

Just having my saturday afternoon stir really but .. :

On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, Stephen Stuart wrote:

> > 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

A slight exaggeration, large providers have more than one assignment of IPs and
according to the RIR info they are used regionally anyway

>    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."

Overlap the more specific with the main block? (I assume) Tony's report shows
originating AS, in which case the sub-assignments wont show towards UUs count.

> 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.

They will still announce the customer's BGP more specifics tho?

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

As above, it is at least as far as I can tell assigned per country.

Steve

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