North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Operational impact of depeering

  • From: Tom Vest
  • Date: Mon Oct 10 14:10:38 2005

On Oct 10, 2005, at 11:02 AM, Hannigan, Martin wrote:

Anti-Level(3)? The only fact in this was the route view
count, and even that could be wrong. Not a very fair
comparison, especially to make to regulatory people who
may not know better.
How in the world does this read as anti-Level3?
What precisely is unfair about the comparison?
Concrete suggestions about how to make a fairer comparison, independently, using public domain information, would be welcome.

AS 174 was old when it was PSI. It's now Cogents ASN via acquisition.
You fairly imply that Cogent is as old as PSI in garnering sympathy for
them being old school. Cogent is not old school.
The implication I was making (maybe too subtly) was that counting this way involves some obvious error terms, one of which is age of allocation -- meaning specifically, address allocation policies in effect at the time that the relevant netblocks were allocated. Scale, a.k.a. host density might be another obvious one. What I meant to suggest was that this method might overstate Cogent's significance.

However I was wrong. I was thinking of the vintage 1991 PSI "Class A" that Cogent still routes. I should have said "both old networks," given L3's two even older BBN "Class As." But if age tends to suggest a certain (freedom of) slack in utilization, then that would mean that the count actually overstates L3's operational significance. So, does that correction makes it less biased -- or more Anti-Level3?

TV