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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Traffic Engineering
At 01:23 PM 9/17/97 -0700, Michael Dillon wrote: > > >The only area in which engineering can be used to solve your hot button >issue is that if providers in your local area build a good local exchange >point then you may be able to persuade more local end users to connect to >local providers in order to attain better local connectivity. > TTraffic exchange is engineering tactical, not business strategic, for national backbones. For regional providers, I think it may become strategic and could be a flaw in the business plans of the backbone providers. If you take web traffic and local traffic out of the national backbone business plans, they have a lot less traffic than they expected. You build the local exchanges as the traffic builds. It is not economic for a group of national backbones to build local exchanges when it is cheaper to backhaul a couple megs of traffic a few hundred or thousand miles and save on the number of exchange points. In the metro areas, it is still often cheaper to backhaul (using CAP facilities) a few dozen miles than build a POP. Some RBOCs proposed NAPs in each LATA some years ago when the NAPs were put out to bid by NSF. This was obviously premature. It is still premature, although I bet there are more than a dozen LATAs where exchange is huge (most already have NAPs or MAEs and private exchanges). The local exchanges will be built -- it's just that we don't know whether they will be public or private. A public exchange makes sense if there is a sensible sponsor and lots of local providers with scale. If only a couple of national backbone providers have the required scale, then the local exchange will be a private interconnect. Remember, the Internet started off as a pervasive but low density technology. It was able to be pervasive only because it used the pervasive telephony infrastructure. It was and is low density because it started from zero. (Duh, you say. Right.) The telephony infrastructure started off entirely local. When there was high density local coverage, there was still no long distance. That came only with the Bell System. For anything that is two-way, pervasive (~100% coverage), and universal (~100% density) -- what will the traffic patterns be? The Internet is only the second two-way, universal, and pervasive technology ever. The first is the telephone. If you extrapolate from the first to the second, then the answer is that local traffic will dominate long-distance traffic. I think that this will be true in any event because the tactical issue of paying for bandwidth versus data storage will drive the Internet to local over long-distance traffic patterns, because bandwidth is more expensive than storage (for the foreseeable future). --Kent
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