COVID-19 vs. our Networks

Tue Mar 17 11:36:06 UTC 2020

On 17/Mar/20 12:37, Christian wrote:

> In theory best-effort Internet is seen as only part of a broader
> Internet model including open peering and so on. The idea for open
> Internet is it offers a form of digital herd immunity (to coin a
> current phrase being misused by UK Government circles in recent days) 
> that offers a level of shared redundancy of spare capacity so that
> issues can be taken out of route until fixed but the edge still
> maintains high quality connectivity.  In one sense the Internet model
> provides an informal community insurance across the provider / access
> sector. Although of course the legacy telco regulated protected
> infrastructure has remained a nub of resistance to open anything.
>
> Some short term financial optimisations between networks may turn out
> to be counter productive across time and "events". Which begs a
> question whether the winner takes all model that has emerged can live
> with a plural supply chain of network infrastructures.
>
> I suspect the concentration over recent years has created greater
> fragility for all of us judging comments in this thread and elsewhere.
> Can we survive covid 19 and maintain selfish networks over open ones?
>

Even if any organization tried to, they can't avoid the allure of the
Internet to optimize costs, because their customers (the kids) are going
to keep looking for value many of these organizations do not know how to
deliver in this new economic era. So reducing costs is the first thing
they will do in order to meet budgets, before the real massacre comes.

A lot of Internet traffic is coalescing around a handful of service
providers, as you rightly point out. They can enhance performance by
building data centres closer to customers in big cities, and then toy
with the idea of having even smaller edge clusters spread across wide
metros. While that does improve availability and performance, I don't
think it really pushes the Internet beyond the realm of "best-effort".

The Internet is not a centralized, government-based entity. On that
basis, it scales very well on a global scale, but conversely, cannot be
tuned to operate in the way traditional telco's do/did, along with the
compromise critical services like health, military and aviation have to
make, to that effect.

Mark.