US-Asia Peering

Sat Jan 11 00:38:19 UTC 2003

At 09:33 AM 1/10/2003 -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:

>       On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
>     > In response to Randy and Bill(s), this seems to come down to a 
> trade off of
>     > commercial vs technical. A lot of us agree this is technically not 
> the best way
>     > and produces instabilities with the potential to take out major 
> chunks of
>     > internet but it is cheap and this means people will adopt this way 
> of doing it,
>     > unfortunately as this has now happened it means those opposed to 
> the idea will
>     > have to also consider this as an option if they are to compete.
>
>I don't think it's fair to characterize it as a trend...  I mean, ten
>years ago, we were all (generalizing here) stupid enough to try these
>tricks.  Fortunately, smarter people have come along since, and learned
>from our mistakes.  There are also _vastly_ more people involved in the
>industry now than then, so it comes as no surprise that there are still
>some newbies trying this, despite all the lessons of the past.  The good
>news is that although they're a quantitatively growing group, they're a
>shrinking _fraction_ of the whole.  So that's evidence of some small
>progress in the state of knowledge.  Fight the law of conservation of
>clue!
>
>                                 -Bill

Bill - the argument seems like Proof by Rigorous Assertion:
I know it is a bad idea.
I really really believe it is a bad idea.
My friends say it's a bad idea.
Not one that I know says it is a good idea.
Therefore, and I can't emphasize this enough, in conclusion, it is a bad idea.

If what you are saying is true, I'd really like to hear just a couple of 
insurmountable technical problems with WAN L2.5 infrastructure 
interconnecting IX switches. For the sake of argument and to clarify the 
discussion (Paul) let's make a few assumptions:

1) We are talking about an operations model where IX switches are operated 
by a single company.
2)  The IX switches are interconnected by MPLS by a transport provider 
offering that service.
3) An ISP on one switch creates a VLAN for peering with ISPs on any of the 
other switches. This ISP VLAN is only for peering with the ISP that created 
this VLAN. Since he is paying for the VLAN traffic he has this right.
4) The cost of transporting the traffic between the switches is bourne by a 
transport provider who in turn charges the ISP that created the VLAN in 
question.

I can articulate a half dozen reasons why this is a good idea. Please share 
with us why this is a such a bad idea. If it has been tried before, it 
would be helpful to point to specific the case and why it failed, the 
technical failure scenario. I'd like to hear why/how it was worse by the 
distance between switches.

Bill