concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speed publicly available?]

Tue Jul 6 04:24:34 UTC 2004

On Jul 5, 2004, at 8:35 PM, Tony Li wrote:

> On Jul 5, 2004, at 5:00 PM, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 5, 2004, at 2:02 PM, vijay gill wrote:
>>
>>> Throwing ethernet cables over the ceiling does not scale.
>>
>> Sure it does.  The question is: "How far does it scale?"  Nothing 
>> scales to infinity, and very, very few things do not scale past the 
>> degenerate case of 1.
>
> You need to take into account all of the aspects of the complexity 
> that you introduce when you
> throw that fiber over the wall tho.  While the fiber installation is 
> simple enough, you have
> now created other problems:  who will maintain it?  Who knows it is 
> there?  Who knows that it
> is there in the other organization?  Who needs to know about it within 
> your own organization?
> How is tracked?  Who does the NOC call when it goes bad?
>
> While it may be a single exception to your network architecture, if it 
> is an exception that
> 100 people need to know about, then I'd argue that it doesn't scale.  
> The fun and games
> that we had in Ye Olden Days o' the Internet simply are not workable 
> when you are coordinating
> with hundreds of other employees.
>
> Put another way, scalability can never overlook the human element.

I'm wondering why you think that the fiber over the ceiling tile is 
somehow less tracked, maintained, monitored, documented, etc., than any 
other fiber in the network?

Put another way: Just because I am not paying someone 1000s of $$ a 
month to watch it for me does not mean the human element is ignored.  
In fact, I have seen many cases where people lost track of 
interconnects where they were paying lots of money for someone else to 
watch them.  So maybe the strange ones are better.... =)

If you do not want to throw cables over the ceiling in your network, 
then by all means do not.  I have repeated many times here and 
elsewhere: Your network, your decision.

And for those of us who can track & maintain zero-dollar interconnects, 
please do not begrudge us the cost savings.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick