US-Asia Peering

Sat Jan 11 17:11:57 UTC 2003

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, William B. Norton wrote:

> 
> 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.

Well, my comments were opinions and "in my experience".. which is a perfectly
valid argument

> 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 

Maybe it works fine technically.. I can think of a number of examples where
companies have their IT done cheaply and it "works" .. then they call an expert
when at some point down the line theres a problem they cant explain!

> 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.

No, this isnt what I'm talking about. I'm talking of IXs with third party MPLS
transport providers connecting delivering vlan to remote sites.

However in your example above I think you have a scenario that I dont think is
available but is certainly around as proposals. The problems with that are not
simple, they are the possibility of complication introduced by multiple parties
and of unexpected behaviour arising which in such a large system has the
potential to affect many customers of many suppliers.

Steve

> 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
> 
> 