All,
Tracking the preceding discussion on fiber cuts has been especially
interesting for me, with my focus being on the future implications of
the pending RBOC mega-mergers now being finalized. The threat that
I see resulting from the dual marriages of SBC/AT&T and VZ/MCI will be
to drastically reduce the number of options that network planners in
both enterprises and xSPs have at their disposal at this time for
redundancy and diversity in the last mile access and metro transport
layers. And higher than those, too, when integrations are completed.
These mergers will result in the integration and optimization of
routes and the closings of certain hubs and central offices in order to
allow for the obligatory "synergies" and resulting savings to kick in.
In the process of these efficiencies unfolding, I predict that business
continuation planning and capacity planning processes, not to mention
service ordering and engineering, will be disrupted to a fare-thee-well,
where end users are concerned. The two question that I have are, How
long will it take for those consolidations to kick in? and, What will
become of the routes that are spun off or abandoned due to either
business reasons surrounding synergies or court-ordered due to
concentration of powers?
While it's true that an enterprise or ISP cannot pin point where their
services are routed, as was mentioned upstream in a number of places, it
is at least possible to fairly accurately distinguish routes from
disparate providers who are using different rights of way. This is
especially true when those providers are 'facilities-based.' However,
the same cannot be said for Type- 2 and -3 fiber (or even copper) loop
providers who lease and resell fiber, such as Qwest riding piggy-back
atop Above.net in an out-of-region metro offering.
But thus far, for the builds that are owned and maintained by Verizon,
SBC, MCI/MFS and AT&T/TCG, such differentiations are still possible.
Not only will end users/secondary providers lose out on the number of
physical route options that they have at their disposal, but once
integration is completed users will find themselves riding over systems
that are also managed and groomed in the upstream by a common set of NMS
constructs, further reducing the level of robustness on yet higher
levels in the stack.
frank@coluccio.net
So although we have the technology to build networks controlled at the edge and networks that are less subject to failure,
the old business models that we cant seem to break out of insist that we remonopolize walled garden telephone monopolies.
Why? Because we imagine them to have wondrous new capabilities of economy of scale. We concentrate the fiber and the
switching centers into evermore centralized potential points of failure. We rob ourselves of redundancy. As with the cisco
router monoculture in our backbones which god help us if it ever failed, we are now building a potential concentration of fiber.
Higher and potentially more fragile than the twin towers. How sad.
How can we gain some understanding of other ways to look at infrastructure? This is terribly short sighted.
How many enterprises do you see Frank that may begin to understand they better build their own infrastructure.
because perhaps placing all your infrastructures marbles in the equivalent of a new set of twin towers is not a good
execution of your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholder...never mind the public at large?
The unfortunate part of all this is there is a demand for diversity, especially from the financial and government sectors. One of the big problems is that clients seldom know which providers or combinaiton of providers give them the most diversity. There are some intersting ways to claculate the optimal set of providers by price and diversity, but getting the data is quite difficult. Sometime large clients like the US government can leverage providers into divulging routing and right of ways, but is definately the exception. Even from our rough analyses there are several areas of heavily shared colocation. Sounds like the problem is getting worse and not better.
The unfortunate part of all this is there is a demand for diversity,
especially from the financial and government sectors. One of the
big problems is that clients seldom know which providers or
combinaiton of providers give them the most diversity. There are
some intersting ways to claculate the optimal set of providers by
price and diversity, but getting the data is quite difficult.
First of all, I think the terminology is part of the problem.
Historically, people bought redundancy or diversity by choosing
two different providers or perhaps by asking one provider to
provide two different routes, i.e. dual entrance. But this
was not enforced contractually and it certainly was not built
into the business and operational processes of the carriers.
Redundancy and diversity where just a fantasy shared between
customers and their sales reps.
There are some large enterprises who build their internal operations
around data centres and Storage Area Networks, essentially
disk farms that are connected to multiple locations with
application servers. These people chose to use the word "separacy"
to refer to a network connections that do not share fate
anywhere along the path. That means that they do not share
the same fibre, or cable, or conduit, or street/tunnel/bridge.
In my company we use this term for the way in which we deliver
various market data feeds over IP networks to our customers.
In addition to the physical separacy our network does not
have a single best route at the IP layer. There are two paths
through different circuits and different routers and all packets
take both paths simultaneously.
Now obviously, either the SAN style of separacy or the market
data feed style costs a bit more money. But the benefit to the
customer is that the concept of seperacy is built into the business
and operational processes, i.e. it is not just a polite fiction
of sales people. Of course, we like all other ISPs, continually
struggle with carriers who don't have this concept themselves
and must continually check, monitor and double-check the carrier's
grooming practices.
I think that in order to resolve this issue on the large scale
we need to have a shared vocabulary and a shared vision of building
a resilient network that is not brittle. The rhetoric of an
Internet with one level of service that is "good enough" has
fogged people's thinking. And the rhetoric of a network with
magic software knobs to provide multiple levels of service
has also fogged people's thinking.
Until we reach general agreement that the way to make a network
resistent to failure is to provide multiple redundant paths
at all layers from physical to IP, this situation will not
improve.
--Michael Dillon
When is that book of yours coming out?
The latest is in the warehouse this september. Thanks for the interest.
best,
sean