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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical [no subject]
Looking at it from a higher point of view, there is the problem of many geographically separated exchange points where a there are sets of providers who cannot talk to each other because there is no common exchange point. However, unlike in North America, the cost of even relatively small amounts of bandwidth is still very high for trans-oceanic capacity. This results in a market opportunity for people who can aggregate (and likely oversell) that expensive capacity to the disjoint sites. There is the issue of keeping customers happy, as has been mentioned, but salami tactics work nicely. In fact, when dealing with expensive transoceanic capacity, it works better, especially when customers are presented with the option of subsidizing (through increasing customer fees) their routes being presented to a small network in America who refuses to pay for their share of the transoceanic capacity. Finally, there's the third approach. It might be workable, but at some point Europeans and Asians will tire of always increasing the amount of money they put into transoceanic circuits and start becoming either customers of bigger, cheaper providers (or members of consortia or associations which accomplish similar cost-savings) or start coming to the same understanding: access to trans-oceanic capacity while it continues to be hiddeously expensive should be paid for at both ends, since both sides benefit. This has been seen to some degree in the past; there are a number of cases where a relatively unsaturated high bandwidth line was made available only conditionally -- one had to be a research network or had to be a friend of someone or other in order to use the big pipe otherwise one would use the much more saturated thinner pipes across the oceans. Seeing messages fly about saying, "Dear brand new AS 8888, if you pay us 200 ECU per month to cover our costs we will carry your routes across the nice fat pipe between our popular network and MAE-EAST, otherwise good luck finding acceptable (or any) transit bandwidth" (only more polite, of course) will not surprise me. So, the answer to the question is, yes, you should be concerned about performance issues, and yes, you should be working on a tractable scalable engineering plan for both North American and intercontinental connectivity, and this should take into account other people's real and perceived costs. In other words, kids, the increasing number of root nameservers outside the U.S.A. is a sign that the Internet is internationalizing. Engineer for that now, or you're probably in for a bumpy ride as various governments including your own stop subsidizing your connectivity elsewhere. Sean. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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