I don't know if anyone cares or is keeping track, but it seems that Sprint
has now passed UU in number of customer routes (or at least, routes sent
to peers).
Looks like UU routes have been steadily falling, dunno if they aggregated
(hah!) or just lost customers due to, well, you know. But by the metrics
people/reporters have been using to declare UU "half the internet", it
looks like they're now #2.
Well.. yeah.. but my hypothetical 64 /8's are twice address space than
your hypothetical 2,097,152 /24's.
About the only conclusion that you can *safely* draw is that Sprint has a
more complicated network than UU does. Now *hopefully*, they have more
customers too, or the Sprint backbone engineers will have to carry a much
higher complexity/customer ratio, which means when the senior engineers finally
snap under the pressure, we'll get junior engineers making weird work-arounds
that will just complicate things 5 years down the road.
Oh wait.. that already happened at most carriers, didn't it? That's where we
got the CURRENT crop of senior engineers..
Well.. yeah.. but my hypothetical 64 /8's are twice address space than
your hypothetical 2,097,152 /24's.
Of course, but it's still a metric I see getting tossed about.
About the only conclusion that you can *safely* draw is that Sprint has
a more complicated network than UU does. Now *hopefully*, they have
more customers too, or the Sprint backbone engineers will have to carry
a much higher complexity/customer ratio, which means when the senior
engineers finally snap under the pressure, we'll get junior engineers
making weird work-arounds that will just complicate things 5 years down
the road.
Or that they peer with even less people than UU does, and force people to
buy transit. But it makes an interesting point about that mythical "50% of
the internet" people talk about with regards to Worldcom, a lot of it is
the same routes, and the amount of single homed customers is a lot less.
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 17:25:21 -0400
From: Valdis Kletnieks
Looks like UU routes have been steadily falling, dunno if
they aggregated (hah!) or just lost customers due to, well,
you know. But by the metrics people/reporters have been
using to declare UU "half the internet", it looks like
they're now #2.
Well.. yeah.. but my hypothetical 64 /8's are twice address
space than your hypothetical 2,097,152 /24's.
One would expect 701 and 1239 to have a similar number of
similarly-sized customers. Perhaps flow data for _701_x$ and
_1239_y$ (some overlap between <x> and <y>) would be more
accurate.
The interesting part of that to me is that the total number of prefixes in
a full feed is in the low 100,000 range, so this still represents a very
large percentage of the entire prefix pie.
It's hard to know how large a percentage though without knowing how many
Sprint customers are also UU customers. i.e. The combination of Sprint
and UU customer routes could still be just 47637 prefixes, though I'm sure
it's somewhere between that and 47637+45410. It's certainly not
47637+45410, which would falsely suggest that together Sprint and UU have
roughly 80% of the internet as customers.
Roughly 34% of the announced UUNET routes are announced by Sprint also.
But as others have indicated, this doesn't mean that much on it's own. It
just means they announce a lot of prefixes, and a big chunk of it both are
announcing.
