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"While I might believe that they offer it as a service to some of their customers, I just can't see one of the world's top five IP carriers [Teleglobe] refusing to route any part of the Internet."

Here's their part of the traceroute from the Slashdot submittor from Greece who reported being unable to access www.macromedia.com. This is as reported to me on Friday, after macromedia.com was taken off the RBL:

5 310 ms 311 ms 250 ms oteny-otenet2.ote.otenet.gr [194.153.81.13]
6 311 ms 310 ms 310 ms if-2-0-0.bb3.NewYork.Teleglobe.net [207.45.199.2 25]
7 300 ms 311 ms 310 ms if-3-1.core2.NewYork.Teleglobe.net [207.45.221.9 8]

He also reported that many of his friends in Greece were unable to access the site, writing: "Every person in business (I am web developer/designer) couldn't not see Macromedia server for the past 4 days. They 'see' internet from different ISPs. I am very certain." This meshes with your pointing out that Teleglobe often is the primary access provider for entire countries.

Teleglobe is a licensed subscriber to the RBL, but as for whether they use it to block traffic other than mail, a quick Google search on "teleglobe MAPS RBL" turns up good leads. See e.g. "JANET, Teleglobe and the RBL," in which one of Teleglobe's clients -- itself a well-known internet provider -- explains to its own customers the situation which has been forced upon them:

Does this affect things other than mail?

Yes. No connections of any kind will work in either direction between JANET and a blackholed address -- not Web, FTP, telnet or anything else.

On another page, they hopefully claim "it is not likely that any valid use of JANET requires access to such networks." Well, maybe that page needs to be updated.

You see why I think this is important?

Jamie McCarthy

The UK academic network charge institutions (2p/MB on average), some of which pass the cost on to individuals, for transatlantic traffic.
Having a way to do reverse traceroutes would be invaluable for identifing the offending traffic more effectively.
Currently we can look at traceroutes for evidence of the JANET US gateways, and the ping time (anything that does through the US gateways >70ms) all of which isn't ideal...

Sounds good :)

There is already a seriously big communications hub in London's docklands area. Plus the UK academic community has its own network (the original Joint Academic Network). They started out on X.25 links and are currently moving to a UK-wide gigabit ethernet. Bristol University (where I work on the network team) is getting one of the SuperJANet 4 links to provide services to the West of England. The point in bringing this up is that all US links from JANet are carried via 3 trans-atlantic TeleGlobe fibres. When they go down, UK universities have major problems accessing the US, and access to the rest of the world (e.g. Japan) is slowed. It doesn't stop working. People still publish papers and Altavista Europe and other repositories still work. The problem, as I've said above is that sudddenly the information at the end of a hyperlink is not there.

The PostScript version of this paper can be found here

Of course having a T1 connection in my room does not make a big difference when it comes to slashdotting, but it makes a HUGE difference when it comes to watching BBC news 24h videostream.

By the way, I am in UK, and, because of JANET business, p0rn of any form is illegal. However, most of the l33t people have found a way around it. Warez is illegal too. But half the guys have put up leech FTPs, with ratios running from 1:3 to 1:1

My exam is on 17th, and here I am slashdotting. I blame the university for my (probable) bad grades.

In the UK the academic network charges the universities for transatlantic bandwidth.

http://bill.ja.net/common/faq.html

However use of the provided caches is not charged in this way. Net result was a drastic increase of cache usage by universities. Far more efficient usage of bandwidth, people paying for their share but still a long way off being a commodity to be exchanged yet.

The rub is that often slow or overloaded uplinks from sites, or site cache servers, can make it hard to tell where the real problem is. That's why it's very, very, important for you to get in touch with us if you think the service is too slow.

Check out our WWW site at wwwcache.ja.net for contact details.

Ta!

Martin