Level 3 blames Internet slowdowns on Technica

Sat Mar 22 16:46:25 UTC 2014

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 7:18 AM, TGLASSEY <tglassey at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I want to ask you folks something...
>
> How do you as the people operating the network think two exabytes of data
> gets pushed across your networks to each of the PRISM Collection Sites
> (daily) with no one noticing... Know what I mean>?
>
> Todd Glassey
>
>
>
I'm sure you're aware there's no such thing as "the network".

There are thousands of individual networks, with no high
level correlation happening between them.  It's trivially
easy for an entity wanting to stay somewhat inconspicuous
to buy a few dozen waves from provider A, another bunch
from provider B, another bunch from provider C, etc.
At the end of the day, they've amassed a significant
chunk of bandwidth; but unless the providers all get
together and start comparing customer lists, circuit
locations, delivery dates, etc.  nobody is going to
realize that all the small individual orders add up to
one very big monitoring and collection infrastructure.

Thanks!

Matt

PS--unless my math is off the mark, 2 exabytes a
day works out to less than 200Gbps sustained.
Even allowing for uneven distribution across the
day, a 1Tbps network is almost trivial to build
these days without incurring undue notice from
providers, especially if you split it across 3 or 4
providers.