wow, lots of akamai

Thu Apr 1 19:53:42 UTC 2021

Niels,

I think to clarify Jean's point, when you buy a 300mbps circuit, you're
paying for 300mbps of *internet *access.

That does not mean that a network should (and in this case small-medium
ones simply can't) build all of their capacity to service a large number of
customer circuits at line rate at the same time for an extended
period, ESPECIALLY to the exact same endpoint. It's just not economically
reasonable to expect that. Remember we're talking about residential service
here, not enterprise circuits.

Therefore, how do you prevent this spike of [insert large number here]
gigabits traversing the network at the same time from causing issues? Build
more network? That sounds easy, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons
why ISPs can't or don't want to do that, particularly for an event that
only occurs once per quarter or so.

Does Akamai bear some burden here to make these rollouts less troublesome
for the ISPs they traverse through the last mile(s)? IMO yes, yes they do.
When you're doing something new and unprecedented, as Akamai frequently
brags about on Twitter, like having rapid, bursty growth of traffic, you
need to consider that just because you can generate it, doesn't mean it can
be delivered.  They've gotta be more sophisticated than a bunch of servers
with SSD arrays, ramdisks, and 100 gig interfaces, so there's no excuse for
them here to just blindly fill every link they have after sitting idle for
weeks/months at a time and expect everything to come out alright and nobody
to complain about it.

On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 1:21 PM Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net> wrote:

> * nanog at nanog.org (Jean St-Laurent via NANOG) [Thu 01 Apr 2021, 21:03
> CEST]:
> >An artificial roll out penalty somehow? Probably not at the ISP
> >level, but more at the game level. Well, ISP could also have some
> >mechanisms to reduce the impact or even Akamai could force a
> >progressive roll out.
>
> It's an online game. You can't play the game with outdated assets.
> You'd not see walls where other players would, for example.
>
> What you're suggesting is the ability of ISPs to market Internet access
> at a certain speed but not have to deliver it based on conditions they
> create.
>
>
>         -- Niels.
>

-- 
Matt Erculiani
ERCUL-ARIN
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