Internet operations during pandemics

Thu Mar 19 17:46:57 UTC 2020

On 3/19/20 9:51 AM, Christopher Morrow wrote:
> During this time, however, 'work from home' technology hasn't really
> progressed along the same path, has it? So, "get to the vpn" is still
> largely a process of getting packets across the wide internet and to
> small locations (your enterprise), there's little relief in site for
> that model:(

IMO that's where local peering comes in, but the big ISPs like AT&T and 
Charter/Spectrum (the two national providers in my area) are loathe to 
peer anywhere except a few big central locations, if at all. It's not a 
technical problem (i.e. Charter has a 10% utilized 10Ge and unused 1Ge 
switch trunks in my facility as custs cancel due to he.net moving in), 
it's a policy problem.

So we end up with setups like colo customers not using Charter at the 
colo because they can get better pricing options, then suddenly they 
have remote workers on high latency cable connections at home since for 
that home cable connection to talk to the colo server traffic has to 
take some crazy long out of state boomerang path that a simple peering 
connection would solve.