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Re: Death of the Internet - details at 11

2004-01-30 17:46:30
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Michael Thomas wrote:

Daniel Senie writes:
 > Wrong origination of routing information. I see from comments below you're
 > looking at the "I'm an end user and want to have multiple paths to the
 > Internet to get more bandwidth or redundancy" aspect. I run a web hosting
 > company. We want to be able to have multiple upstream providers and
 > multihome to guard against outages at any one provider. We pay for
 > bandwidth based on usage, and so may well have several connections, but
 > designate one or more to be used only if other connectivity as a last 
resort.
 >
 > As the content provider who's spending lots of money on which of MY
 > circuits I want traffic to arrive on, I don't want you deciding on your two
 > DSL lines to choose one of my sets of addresses or the other. If you stream
 > video over a link I don't want used normally, my bills would skyrocket.
 >
 > This is why I said the decisions in YOUR stack are deciding routing policy
 > for MY circuits. In the IPv4/BGP world configuration of this stuff isn't
 > clean or simple, but it is possible to encourage the use of some links over
 > others. I don't see how I would be able to implement that type of control
 > with your simplistic SCTP stack tests, other than to play games with
 > discarding or delaying probe packets from your computer on some paths.

   Now wait a minute. It's your bandwidth... shouldn't
   you be _shaping_ his traffic if there's some reason
   he shouldn't be using one path or another? And thus
   provide negative feedback so that he has incentive
   to use the path that you want him to use? After all,
   the end consumer is likely clueless about your
   network and is going to do whatever they can to
   get what they're after -- bandwidth. Sounds to
   me that if he's able to cause your bills go
   through the ceiling _you're_ doing something
   wrong.

Yes, I agree. Afterall, the purpose for a content provider to be
multihomed is so that they can provide more redundancy to their customers.
The content provider only knows about the parameters (capacity, etc) of
its incoming links, but has NO clue about the dynamics/quality of the
customer's path to those links. Any given user may have a different
experience to each of the content provider's incoming links. Thus, the
customer is in the best position to decide which destination is best at
any point in time. So, as Mike said, if the content provider has a
preference, it must encourage/discourage using traffic shapers, etc.

~armando

0--                                              --0
| Armando L. Caro Jr.  |  Protocol Engineering Lab |
| www.armandocaro.net  |    University of Delaware |
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