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EBone/KPNQwest Network Shutting Down
reginald.barclay writes "As KPNQwest has filed for bankruptcy some time ago, also EBone, which they aquired some months ago, goes down the drain. Together, these two companies carried betwenn 1/3 and 1/2 of European IP Traffic (and, in the case of KPNQwest, an unknown portion of voice). Employees at Ebone were laid off last week and told to abandon their NOC. But instead of getting drunk and over with it, they occupied their former workplace. Now even their time is running out, and one of Europes oldest backbone carriers will probably be shut down today, at 1700 CET. I wonder how many of their customers (mostly ISPs and VBCs themselves) have managed to run to the competition in time. Nevertheless, I expect the routing in large parts of Europe to be very interesting (in the chinese sense, of course) over the coming weekend and early next week." Update: 06/14 18:02 GMT by M : Apparently KPNQwest's creditors have agreed to pay to keep the place going until the end of June.
HTH
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
At least one ISP (Bahnhof) in Sweden has put in a bid for some of the european network infrastructure according to Computer Sweden. So perhaps parts of it wont go down just yet.
We already started to have routing trouble here in Germany. Mostly routes to German sites can't be established. That is from my regionla ISP here in Cologne (NetCologne), don't know how T-Online is doing. You could even see where a traceroute broke down when reaching KPN and was later established through other providers.
/.
At least there is no problem to connect to
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
...due to KPNQwest's problems.
It took them 3 days to solve and now I don't see anymore problems.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
Supposedly there aren't going to be many problems.
TheRegister has been running a few stories on this for a while, and I believe they at one point got comments from a number of ISPs, most said no worries, AOL said they use some of their net but that they have multiple other provides. BT claims there is stacks of capacity kicking around, so hopefully nothing but a minor glitch for the majority of users, although anyone who did NOT move from the KPNQwest network is screwed.
TheReg story on the latest is here: TheReg 4:45 BST Shutdown (Oddly enough the article states 4pm BST but the headline 4:45... Weird)
and the BT comment is here: TheReg - BT on Capacity
Z.
According to Internet Traffic Report the router defra229-tc.ebone.ne is not responding. Several other KPNQwest/Ebone routers are still up though.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Ebone carries about 25%, the rest of KPNQwest carries another 25% - the total company carries about 50%. Ebone was never really integrated into the rest of the KPNQwest network (hadn't had time before the company went splat).
As Netcom UK we are now in control of large parts of the UK network and we fully intend to keep it running for as long as possible. However our main concern are the transmission links as they're all managed from Brussels.
As the Netcom entity we're pretty secure although we anticipate a mad scrambling to reconfigure part of our network, we will also try to keep the majority of the UK Ebone customers online, but all of that depends on the extend of the backbone shutdown, so Irish customers might be not as "lucky". But AS5571 should be largely okay.
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
BGP statistics pertaining to KPNQwest AS286 also, keep your eye on NANOGfor any info related to the impact of the shutdown.
According to this article (in Dutch only) Belgian unions (their members) are not going to shutdown the NOC in Hoeilaart(B).
They have come to an agreement with the curators. The curators have offered 40 employees a 5 week contract so the NOC can stay in operation with a skeleton crew. Employees of other NOCs ( 200 in total) around Europe were offered similar contracts.
It will probably be a 5 week long last breath.
Sjaak.
Yesterday (thursday) I heared someone say on the news that they found some investors and got enough money to live through this month.
That leaves them with roughly two weeks to find a real solution. The bottom line stays the same. They have to find a lot of money somewhere.
The strange thing is that announcement was made on th 6 o'clock news and the press release is from 5 o'clock.
Privacy is terrorism.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
it's extremely unlikely to be OC-anything, cause it's in Europe and they use the STM/SDH system. :)
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
If you take a look at the LINX peering matrix (warning: insanely large HTML table), you'll see that JAnet (JNT) a.k.a. UKERNA is peered with many other providers, including UUNet and PSI, so no, I don't think they're going to disappear overnight.
Yup...but you should read carefully (or maybe I didn't explain well enough). It's like this:
So, it's very much in KPN's interest that the network stays running. That is also why they are paying millions a day (by my understanding) to keep things running.
Because as soon as they don't, they will
And because KPN, as any large telecom provider (at least in Europe at the moment), is - to say the least - not exactly doing great by itself either, they will probably watch out REAL good not to let something like this happen!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Whilst we have been aware of this possibility for some time now our networks have been designed to take account of this type of event. Naturally, given the issues with KPNQwest, we have recently confirmed that our network can accommodate the loss of Ebone.
We estimate that about 5% of our traffic is currently routed by Ebone and that is mostly to other European sites.
When or if Ebone is turned off we expect traffic to reroute via other connections in London and Amsterdam.
We believe it is unlikely that there are any other networks connected exclusively to Ebone, so we do not expect any destinations to become unavailable in the event that Ebone closes.
In the event that Ebone close it will take time for traffic patterns across Europe to settle down, however we expect the effect will be limited to some traffic following less than optimal routes and occasional hot spots of congestion.
We will of course be monitoring our network for adverse effects in the event that Ebone closes and we will carry out any necessary maintenance should we find such hot spots that do not resolve themselves."
See the update at Heise (google translated). Or use the original in German.
Have a nice weekend.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
(emphasis mine)
This is because JANET is connected to the DANTE network which is run by COLT Telecom
PRESS RELEASE
We are pleased to announce the hard-line strategy of the Union-led volunteers at Ebone in Belgium appears to have finally reaped rewards. Sufficient funds have been provided to maintain operations throughout Europe. This vital capital will be used to cover operational costs for 2 weeks. This includes the salaries for 200 people, of which 40 people will be from the Belgian Operations Centre. During this time, we are very confident of reaching a positive outcome to the negotiations which are continuing to find a buyer for the Ebone network.
It can therefore be confirmed that the now passed deadline of 17.00 C.E.T. for a network shutdown, will not be executed.
A further press release will follow in due course.
Employees of Ebone, with their Unions
Resp.editors. Henri Jean Ruttiens, secretary BBTK Setca
Well, according to JaNet's "External Network access Provision" page, there's another 2.5Gbits from JaNet to the US that isn't KPNQ. And, incidentally, my connection to slashdot, from bris.ac.uk (on janet,) doesn't go via any of janet's transatlantic links, it goes though linx and then UUNet. No black holes here, thank you very much :-)