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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.
The next time someone is talking on slashdot about how mergers are natural in the telecom industry, and telecom companies that lock down entire markets until they are local monopolies in some cities are Just Trying to Make a Living, and the government has no right to dictate that a telecom company be "nice" to their competitors, and there's absolutely no harm in megamerger after megamerger followed by competitors being disallowed from leasing space on the local telecom equipment..
I'm going to link this article.
And then i'm going to scream something incoherent along the lines of "BAD AYNDROID!! BAD!! BAD!! SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE BAD!! MONOCULTURE BAD!!, and then curl up in a little ball and cry because no-one really cares.
I'm sitting in an office in Brussels, it will be interesting to see how stopping this backbone affects the Internet in Europe. The BBD reported that Ebone carries 25%, their website reports 50%, of traffic in Europe.
Anyone tried this kind of nuclear blast on th Internet before?
My blog
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?
because you don't live in Europe, think again.
I live in Tennessee, but my email provider (Runbox.com) is based in Norway. Fortunately they managed to get their stuff together and should* be safe.
*should: a moral term that has nothing to do with computers. "It' should work." is a worthless statement.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
For better or worse, a couple large networking companies in my aread have gone out business recent, one of whom is our upstream provider. Unlinke what sounds like may happen in this case, we had zero downtime. Another company bought the network for pennies on the dollar. Only way we can tell anything changes is we havn't gotten a bill for two months because the new company doesn't have their act together in that regard yet.
Similar thing happened with the major compition to Verizon. They went out of business, and to the best of my knowledge their customers who have not left (many did), have not lost service, although that whole fiasco is not finished.
Anyway, chances are, another large networking company will buy the network for almost nothing, and pick up where the existing company left off...just with much lower capital investments, which may lead to lower prices.
I for one believe things like this are a mixed blessing, and in some cases needed to lower the cost structure for providing these services. Kinda like a built in cost correction.
I may be way off base with this, but that's what I think base on what I have seen locally.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Or maybe they're frantically emailing out their resumes before the T1 dies.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Yeah, we'll just route right around Europe. I just hope you aren't trying to talk to anyone in the hole.
The point everyone makes about routing around damage is just that, the Internet is designed to be able to route around sections that go away. But if half the ISPs in Europe are behind the routers that go away, they'll be gone. But everyone else will still be able to talk to Asia, Africa, or what ever.
I do know that just about every time I've tracerouted to a site in Europe I've seen "ebone" in the trace. I think this could be bad for a lot of people.
...until clients find alternative solutions.
Mind you, KPN (which owns 40% of KPNQWest shares) has several Really Big Contracts with rather big companies, such as Schiphol Airport (which also has a very big hosting colo), guaranteeing that the network will ALWAYS run, or they'll have to pay the damages of breaking their contract.
So, as long as 'cost to keep the network running' < 'cost to piss off biggest customers REAL good', the network will keep running.
You can check this article (in Dutch), which says at least the Belgian network will keep running. Short translation of the article: employees where working for free to keep the network up and running, now they have a temporary contract for a few weeks, guaranteeing them they'll get paid if they keep the network running.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The internet is coming off its "high" from the late 90's, and is in the hangover stage. It will get over the hangover, swear off alc^M^M^M unrealistic spending on stupid ideas, and return to existance as a much more healthy mature Internet.
The bubble burst, and is coming back down to where it should be.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
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
quote: "According to information gathered by the group, the three executives awarded themselves ten-fold salary and bonus increases in May 2001, which were kept secret till the day after the sale of GTS's assets was announced. The three received a total of $21m (£14.7m) in 2001, a sum that amounted to 52 percent of the stock value of the company at the time, said Kaplan. By comparison, Enron's much criticized "loyalty bonuses" only amounted to a few percent of its value."
No Zen is good zen
PHB: That's it, money gone, shut down the ebone.
NETOP: Right on cap'n, shutting down ebone now...
PHB: Thank you.
NETOP: Slight problem, the guy that knows the router config to stop it working left, he was made redundant last week.
PHB: Ah, can't we just switch them off?
NETOP: No can do cap'n, no remote power off for security reasons.
PHB: So we need somebody to go out to site and switch all the routers off?
NETOP: That's what i'm telling you captain. These CISCO's just work so well, and without the guy who knows how to configure them to stop working we can't shut the network down.
PHB: OK, how many sites is that?
NETOP: About 23,239
PHB: Ok, get onto field maintenance.
NETOP: Slight problem, they were all made redundant last week.
PHB: Anyone fancy a pint?
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.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Europe - "The Final Countdown"
What were the skies like when you were young?
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.
The Ebone network hasn't been shut down. I'm a pround Ebone customer, and our network is properly wor
{{.sig}}
I dunno, I think there should be a government bailout of something like this.
No. No. No.
If the infrastructure is really that critical (like a country's highway system is), then the government should nationalize the backbone and make it available to competing ISPs under identical terms (i.e. actually allow competition and prevent vertical monopolies leveraged from physical monopolies over last mile cable and critical backbone links from forming).
If it isn't that important, then they should simply stand aside and let these companies go belly up, with all the consiquences that entails.
In no way should an existing, unsuccessful commercial enterprise be propped up by government: either the free market works, or there is no free market (read: monopoly), in which case the underlying structural cause of the monopoly (if any, in this case perhaps the copper, esp. if last-mile copper is involved) should be nationalized, and the market opened up so it can operate freely, with competition.
Bailouts are the worst of both possible worlds: government intervention and expenditure of public funds AND private corporate control with no public accountability (beyond their stockholders, if they happen to be traded publicly).
When Northpoint went under with no warning it sucked (we were off the net for 2 days due to that fiasco, and NSI didn't fix our DNS for 10 days), but even there a government bailout would have been wrong.
Nationalizing Ameritech's last mile of copper, so that Ameritech wouldn't be able to maliciously leverage that monopoly to drive competing DSL providers like Northpoint out of business, on the other hand, would have been a reasonable response. Unfortunately the ayndroids of the far right have managed to convince a large percentage of people that free enterprise is a panacea in all contexts and the only good governance is no governance. Nonsense, of course, as anyone can see (just try applying that logic to public highways and try to imagine the economic impact of Road Monopolies), but it is a widespread and in many respects crippling meme that has infected much of America.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
It's on The Register [theregister.co.uk] too
Well, according to mtr www.theregister.co.uk is now 28 hops away.
Traffic is now routed from chellonetworks to alter.net.
Instead of the normal 6 hops.
O yeah, it is routed from Amsterdam to London, then to New York, Washington and then back to London and to www.theregister.co.uk.
I can't imagen that this is the fastest route...
But to be fair i'm using an UPC/Chello connection.
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
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
Wow. It's amazing how wrong you are. ATT from the60's and 70's invented UNIX, C, AWK (whence Perl), etc. And that was just in one department. They made so many amazing improvements in CS, Information Theory, etc. Basically, anything that could in some way benefit the largest company in the world.
In fact, if you look at it, most of the world's great research labs (Xerox PARC, IBM, Bell Labs) have been the result of monopolies, not start-ups.