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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Vulnerbilities of Interconnection
On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 [email protected] wrote: > The question is what if someone was gunning for your fiber. To date > cuts have been unintentional. Think about it: - how many fiber paths are there that cross the deserts or mountains between the densely populated areas in the US? - how hard would it be to take out enough so the remaining phone and IP capacity gets massively congested? - how hard would it be to slow down repair efforts? Safeguarding an interconnect location is a lot easier than safeguarding a cross-continental fiber. And generally, when a pure interconnect location goes down, the impact is farly minimal: usually only mild congestion for some destinations. Just the networks that were stupid enough to have their transit run through the exchange location have a real problem. (And some people are cheap enough to do this.) The real problems start when the problem is bigger and colocation facilities go down. Then authentication services can get wiped out which hurts entire classes of users. Engineering an IP network that can survive partial outages isn't all that hard. Finding someone to pay for it all is harder. But engineering services that store large amounts of data that can survive partial outages isn't an easy thing to do.
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