Exodus/C&W Depeering

Tue Mar 26 20:49:09 UTC 2002

At 10:18 AM 26-03-02 -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:

>       On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
>     > You mean Exodus are well connected and C&W limit themselves which gives
>     > longer paths and increased latency.
>
>Longer paths definitely, increased jitter probably, increased latency
>probably, increased loss possibly.

In general, as companies and backbones merge and eliminate "old" ASNs, that 
would reduce the overall AS path length.  That in general should not affect 
latency but as tier-1 ASNs grow in size, and control more of the path end 
to end, the latency should improve.  The majors/tier1s like AT&T, UUnet, 
Genuity and C&W provide SLAs "end-to-end" *within* their ASN.  They control 
the pipes, they know what they can take and they don't have to worry about 
some overloaded peering link.  So as consolidation takes place, we should 
see better latencies and better SLAs.

-Hank

>C&W obviously have to have a lot of peering as well, since it's all they
>have to sell to their customers.  However, their peering tends to be
>limited to a small number of peers to whom they have large connections,
>whereas Exodus had a large number of peers to whom they had medium-sized
>connections.  So the average hop-count and as-path length for the Internet
>as a whole are both increased by this action, and nearly all paths
>increase in length for Exodus customers.  So yes, Exodus customers are the
>big losers in the wake of this.
>
>                                 -Bill