East Coast outage?

Fri Aug 15 17:53:18 UTC 2003

On vrijdag, aug 15, 2003, at 17:55 Europe/Amsterdam, 
Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

>> Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always
>> lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more
>> autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more
>> reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging
>> failure modes.

> And if we extrapolate that lesson to IP networks it implies that any
> medium to large sized organization should do their own BGP peering
> and multihome to 3 or more upstream network providers.

While this certainly has its advantages, I don't think it follows from 
Joe's remarks. What would follow is having many smaller transit 
networks rather than a few big ones. But I think in this regard IP is 
well ahead of the electricity people.

Still, I don't think it's this simple, as the problem with power is 
that supply and demand must be the same at all times. So if a decent 
chunk of the network that connects the two goes down, the supply side 
gets into trouble because they're suddenly generating too much. If the 
difference is big enough it's probably impossible to arrive at a new 
equilibrium above 0 fast enough. If you connect everything together you 
can absorb bigger imbalances but then when you get one you can't 
absorb, the impact is larger of course.

Fortunately in our business we have queues to smooth the spikes in 
network use and when we drop packets there are no sparks.

> Perhaps we should start working on a hierarchical routing system in
> which the concept of a "global routing table" cannot develop. Perhaps
> announcements and withdraws should have a TTL so that they never
> propogate very far from their source AS?

Have a look at the work going on in the IETF multihoming in IPv6 
(multi6) working group and the IRTF routing working group.