Easing Backbone Traffic By Scanning The Net

A reader writes "Of the schemes being concocted to ease traffic among Internet backbone providers, InterNap Network Services Corp. may have the most ambitious: a setup that bypasses the peering process entirely by scanning the Net for optimal routes. EEtimes has the full story on their plan."

Comments

Re:What makes this different from a peering point

[phungus]

I took two tours with them awhile back and was explained the process...

They buy pipes from anyone with more than 1% of the global routing table on the net. They put all of these pipes in a PNAP in a location and they provide full redundancy on all of the links and equipment.

They pull in all of the routes, shoot them to a Linux box that massages the routing tables so that if a customer packet is destined for Alter.net, it will only travel down Alter.net's network, thus bypassing clogged peering edge routers. It doesn't rely on AS-PATH decisions at that point.

The edge peering routers are, traditionally, the most clogged/slow of the links on a providers network. Think about it, are you going to spend more money on your core routers that support YOUR network, or routers that pass global internet traffic to other networks? BBN planet was having these problems this week, in fact at some of their peering routers. It was all broken. :)

It is really quite an original idea. Very expensive to maintain all of the different links to all of the providers, but they only accept DS3 customers and higher, and you do get VERY good performance.

Not that revolutionary

[jwang]

This isn't that big a deal. If you read the article you'll find that all they're doing is laying connections between the busiest WWW sites.

It's not scanning or anything, just laying new fiber and forcing people to pay. Calling this new technology is like calling a toll road revolutionary.

Re:Not that revolutionary

[Ryandav]

You are 100% completely wrong, on all accounts:

1) They don't "lay connections" between web sites. They pay for peering with large BB providers.

2) They do some really funky stuff to BGP to make things more efficient and redundant. But it's a secret ;)

3) "Forcing people to pay"? Uhh, it's called selling something, and you study it in econ.

Why is it that every gee-whiz article these days has 50 people sign on immediately and say "whoopdeedoo"? I understand being a jaded technologist, but sometimes someone does something cool, and not EVERYONE on the planet knows about it. Don't dig it, don't read techie news sites...

They run mostly linux, too. Check their GPL policy.

The lost revenues caught my eye.

[ichimunki]

To me, this is the most interesting point in the whole article: "The money issue is important because to date, no company is turning a profit at providing backbone connections. And InterNap itself is still losing money -- the publicly traded company reported losses of $43.4 million on revenues of $22.5 million for the first six months of this year."

As the backbone providers ratchet rates up to alleviate this red ink, InterNap will start to make more money as demand rises for their colo service (since this means less traffic over the backbones), but I'm most curious how this sort of thing will play out when a business realizes that 90% of its customers are all on one node and why should they pay for backbone traffic at all if they can serve most of their customers without it?

uh, they've been doing this for about 3-4 years..

[switchninja]

This is nothing new. InterNAP has been doing this for years now. Which is why they're so goddamn expensive. But I must say that they offer the *best* data pipes you can possibly get. They peer with 8-9 of the largest providers in each PNAP and your traffic goes to the provider that has the best route. They do an exhaustive systematic search through the global BGP routing table and pick and choose their routes individually. I would assume their route-maps are freaking gigantic. Their technology is unfortunately not real time... (yet. ;) Anyone who knows how BGP works can figure out how they do this.. it seems rather simple (I deal with them on a regular basis) but they came up with it first.

You mean, all it takes is shiny stuff?

[Froid]

I've got some tinfoil and a ten-watt smurf nightlight for you, and I'm prepared to undercut their offer. Is it a deal?