Tromboning: Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

[Tyler Durden]

Oh yeah. Bellovin. The Optical Networking guy at Columbia.

Not a bad textbook, but a bit theoretical.

The Optical Cross Connect guys seemed to like it down in Redbank though.

-TD

> Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:05:10 -0400
> From: smb at cs.columbia.edu
> To: rah at shipwright.com
> CC: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net; gold-silver-crypto at rayservers.com;
cryptography at metzdowd.com
> Subject: Re: Tromboning: Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.
>
> On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:32:15 -0400
> "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Evidently not just anyone can stick two links together using one box
> > and three ethernet cards, or whatever, or the Internet Gets Broken.
>
> Not quite, but see below.
> >
> > Geeze, to paraphrase Grace Slick, I wish I knew BGP.
> >
> > (Though, like Grace was at the time, I'm too burned-out a dog these
> > days to learn those new tricks. Easier to doze off on the veranda
> > watching the weather go by.)
> >
> BGP is indeed complex -- not the theory, but the practice: how it's
> actually used.
>
> Fundamentally, BGP is a way to implement routing *policy*: ISPs
> (actually, ASs -- Autonomous Systems) use BGP so that traffic they're
> carrying goes the way it's supposed to, more or less.  The metric, of
> course is money -- what do they get paid for certain traffic over
> certain paths, compared to others?  Among the many criteria that are
> considered are traffic engineering, load-balancing among different
> links, reducing latency for certain kinds of traffic, balancing bytes
> and packets sent and received to certain BGP neighbors, minimizing the
> number of prefixes you have to carry around in your routers (currently
> about 240K for the so-called "default-free zone"), AUP restrictions,
> customer satisfaction, redundancy, regulation, and more.
>
> You can't just connect a couple of random Ethernets and have things JFW
> (Just Work), the way you can with LANs in a building.  For one thing,
> the Internet is too big; OSPF won't handle nearly that many prefixes.
> For another, no one will (or rather, no one should) let you blindly
> claim to carry traffic for random prefixes.  (The reality of that is
> quite different and much more crypto-relevant...)
>
> RAH: I'm quite certain this won't get to the other lists you've posted
> to, but feel free to forward this.
>
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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