Risk of Internet collapse grows

Wed Nov 27 13:37:58 UTC 2002

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 variable at ednet.co.uk wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, David Diaz wrote:
> 
> > I think this is old news.  There was a cover story back in 1996 time 
> > frame on  Mae_east.  We have to ask how likely is this with many of 
> > the top backbones doing private peering over local loops, how much 
> > damage would occur if an exchange point where hit?

well recent issues have suggested an exchange can cause short term issues at
least, for a longer outage i dont think we have an example.. in the short term
flap dampening causes unreachability and circuits hitting capacity prior to a
reroute by the noc are big problems but these may be solvable (or worsened) if
an outage were to persist..

> It depends which exchange point is hit.  There are a couple of buildings 
> in London which if hit would have a disasterous affect on UK and European 
> peering.

Europe would reroute, UK would suffer.. but this comes back to the regional
effect

> What about fibre landing stations?  Are these diverse enough?  Again, most
> of the transatlantic fibre (for the UK) appears to come in near Lands End.

Hmm, I know of multiple landings including lands end... so it is diverse, but
the sheer bandwidth down one cable is very large, an outage would be noticable.

Steve