Internet Video: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the US Peering Ecosystem (v1.2)

Wed Jan 10 17:56:04 UTC 2007

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 09:33:41AM -0800, William B. Norton wrote:
> 
> Why are folks turning away 10G orders?
> 
> I forgot to mention a couple other issues that folks brought up:
> 4) the 100G equipment won't be standardized for a few years yet, so
> folks will continue to trunk which presents its own challenges over
> time.

	well, there's a few important issues here:

	currently the "state-of-the-art" is to bundle/balance
n*10G.  While it's possible to do 40G/n*40G in some places, this
is not entirely universal.

	Given the above constraint, in delivering 10G/n*10G to
"customers" requires some investment in your infrastructure
to be able to carry that traffic on your network.  The cost difference
between sonet/sdh ports compared to 10GE is significant here and
continues to be a driving force, imho.

	Typically in the past, the "tier-1" isps have had a larger
circuit than the customer edge.  eg: I have my OC3, but my provider
network is OC12/OC48.  Now with everyone having 10G since it is
"cheap enough", this drives multihoming, routing table size, fib/tcam
and other memory consumption, including the corresponding CPU
"cost".

> 5) the last mile infrastructure may not be able to/willing to accept
> the competing video traffic . There was some disagreement among the
> group I discussed this point with however.  A few of the cable
> operations guys said there is BW and the biz guys don't want to 'give
> it away' when there is a potential to charge or block (or rather
> mitigate the traffic as they do now).

	I suspect this in varies depending on how it's done.  Most of
the "cable" folks are dealing with short enough distances as long as
the fiber quality is high enough, they could do 10/40G to the
neighborhood.  The issue becomes the coax side as well as the bandwidth
consumption of those "analog" users.  Folks don't upgrade their TV or
set-top-box as quickly as they upgrade their computers.  There's also a
significant cost associated with any change and dealing with those
grumpy users if they don't want a STB either.

> My favorite data point was from Geoff Huston who said that the cable
> companies are clinging to their 1998 business model as if it were
> relevent in the world where peer-2-peer for distribution of large
> objects has already won. He believes that the sophisticated
> peer-2-peer is encrypting and running over ports noone will shut off,
> the secure shell ports that are required for VPNs.
> 
> So give up, be the best dumb pipes you can be I guess.

	I suspect there's going to be continued seperation "at the top"
as folks see it.  Those that can take on these new 10G and n*10G customers
and deliver the traffic and those who run into peering and their own
network issues in being able to deliver the bits.  While 100G will ease
some of this, there's still those pesky colo/power issues to deal with.
unless you own your own facility, and even if you do, you may have
months if not years of slowly evolving upgrades to face.  Perhaps
there will be some technology that will help us through this, but
at the same time, perhaps not, and we'll be getting out the huge rolls
of duct tape.  It may not be politics that drives partial-transit/paid 
peering deals, it may just be plain technology.

	- Jared

> On 1/10/07, Brandon Butterworth <brandon at rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> Then that wouldn't be enough since the other Tier 1's would need to
> >> upgrade their peering infrastructure to handle the larger peering
> >> links (n*10G), having to argue to their CFO that they need to do it so
> >> that their competitors can support the massive BW customers.
> >
> >Someone will take the business so that traffic is coming
> >regardless, they can either be that peer or be the source
> >with the cash. If they can't do either then they're not
> >in business, I hope they wouldn't ignore it congesting
> >their existing peers (I know...)
> >
> >> Then even if the peers all upgraded the peering gear at the same time,
> >> the backbones would have to be upgraded as well to get that traffic
> >> out of the IXes and out to the eyeball networks.
> >
> >The Internet doesn't scale, turn it off
> >
> >brandon
> >
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> //------------------------------------------------
> // William B. Norton <wbn at equinix.com>
> // Co-Founder and Chief Technical Liaison, Equinix
> // GSM Mobile: 650-315-8635
> // Skype, Y!IM: williambnorton

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.