remember the "diameter of the internet"?

Mon Jun 17 22:08:59 UTC 2002

brett watson observed :

> i sit behind cox-cable service at home, and in troubleshooting why my
> connectivity is *so* horrible, i find the following traceroute.  does
> anyone do any sane routing anymore?  does diameter matter (we
> used to talk
> about it a long, long while ago).  i guess i'm just old and
> crusty but this
> seems to violate so many natural laws.
>
> i find in more random testing that i seem to be a minimum of
> 15 hops from
> anything, and it's not just the # of hops, it's the *paths* i travel.
> bouncing between two cities several times, on several
> different provider
> networks, from one border to the other.
>
> wow.
>
> -b
>
> traceroute www.caida.org
>
>

Mine is equally bad... (also on Cox)
going from Oklahoma, to Dallas, to KS, to Chicago, BACK to Dallas, and
finally out to the left coast...

This leads me to believe that att/cox may not be as fully meshed with other
providers as they could be. (see various flames on peering for any number of
reasons why) One could also posit that you are seeing the results of
someone's idea of traffic engineering.

I can't imagine cable modem users creating a large demand for bandwidth to
caida.org anytime in the near future, so cox/att et. al. are not going to
fix something that isn't 'broken'. The altruistic days of 'running the
network together' couldn't be more dead and buried, IMHO.