Slashdot Mirror
Blackout Shows Net's Fragility
It doesn't come easy wrote to mention a ZDNet article discussing a recent outage between Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communication. A business feud inadvertently highlighted the fragility of the Internet's skeleton. From the article: "In theory, this kind of blackout is precisely the kind of problem the Internet was designed to withstand. The complicated, interlocking nature of networks means that data traffic is supposed to be able to find an alternate route to its destination, even if a critical link is broken. In practice, obscure contract disputes between the big network companies can make all these redundancies moot. At issue is a type of network connection called 'peering.' Most of the biggest network companies, such as AT&T, Sprint and MCI, as well as companies including Cogent and Level 3, strike "peering agreements" in which they agree to establish direct connections between their networks. "
Internet cannot route when your providers do not want you to communicate.
Nothing can protect you in this case.
If on the other hand there was a natural calamity and every one was trying to get you access
then you would get it. Like it happened during Katarina.
This is not a natural calamity.
The best option is to ditch your provider if they are not a monopoly and if they are lobby to your government to create multiple providers.
It's very true, and anyone can see how a few big companies basically make the net work in north america. Simply do traceroutes to various big web sites, and you'll notice the packets always go across the same networks. The biggest one seems to be alter.net (MCI), with others including Level3, above.net, AT&T and UUnet. Basically you remove any of these and the North American part of the Internet would be in chaos. The problem is because most ISPs do the same thing. They pick a primary provider, and get a backup one. The problem is they all pick the same few primary companies, and their backup links are much smaller pipes.
NANOG has been on fire with posts about this issue over the past few days. The following two from Leo Bicknell do a good job of explaining why this sort of thing would happen, why nobody in particular is The Bad Guy[tm], and why this issue has no relevance to the issue of internet resilience in the case of natural or manmade disaster:
. html. html
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg12302
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg12350
Check the NANOG archive over the last few days for far, far more than you ever wanted to know about "The Art of Peering: The Peering Playbook"... or read the book yourself.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
About 4 months ago I got a call from a sales critter at Cogent saying "We will knock 50% off of the price you are paying for your L3 connectivity if you drop them and come be our customer." I was kind of surprised at the boldness of this proposition because they were specifically targeting current L3 customers. I was even more surprised to find out from others that this sales pitch from Cogent was company wide. Of course this pissed off L3 and that was the start of this pissing contest.
I know there's been talk of wireless mesh networks where everybody is both an end point and a router. This would work in populated areas but I'm not sure how well it would work for "long haul" connections which is what the issue is here.
If by "work in populated areas" you mean "slow the network to a crawl" then yes, it would work. Mesh networking is cool stuff, but you aren't going to build a backbone out of it. Wireless is really fast compared to your DSL line or cable modem. But it isn't even in the same ballpark as what you can do on fiber. Backbone links are running at 10Gbps or even 40Gbps. Full duplex, so that is 20Gbps or 80Gbps of "marketing bandwidth". Compared to what, 22Mbps or 54Mbps half-duplex for your wireless? You aren't going to build a comparable backbone out of wireless links running at roughly 1/1000th of the speed. Physics pretty much guarantees that fiber links will always be faster than wireless.