RE: Distribution CPG Protocol - Some Thoughts

[Oliver Spatscheck <spatsch@research.att.com>]

Since I introduced the word region I would like to clarify that
I never intended to imply geographic region. Internally we use
the term region as a collection of prefixes.... . I think AS
is to coarse grain. If I tell you it is in 701 what do you
really know. So I guess neither term is intuitive and clear.

Oliver


Stephen Thomas writes:
 > At 09:06 PM 2001-01-04 -0500, Oliver Spatscheck wrote:
 > >I agree with you that we won't need per transaction real time feedback for the
 > >purpose of direction (we might need it to fulfill legal requirements for on
 > >line gambling ....), however, we need fairly fast feedback of the sort CDN A
 > >is covering network B in region C with available capacity D for service E.
 > 
 > Maybe this is just a red herring, but the notion of "regions" can come up 
 > several times on this thread, with the implication that we're referring to 
 > geographic regions. Am I the only one that's bothered by this? I'm bothered 
 > for a couple of reasons. First, is the notion of terrestrial geography even 
 > relevant here. No doubt some clue-challenged folks at a large content 
 > provider would be pleased to hear "the CDN we just signed up for has 
 > surrogates in France." At little digging, however, might reveal that the 
 > major non-PTT ISP in France does not have very good connectivity with the 
 > PTT ISP, and, in fact, most of the traffic between the two ISPs actually 
 > routes through the United States. (This is just a made-up example, but it 
 > is representative of reality; the last time I saw the statistics, over 40% 
 > of trans-Atlantic Internet traffic was actually being routed to the US and 
 > immediately turned back around and returned to Europe.) If the content 
 > provider really wanted to improve the experience of French users (75% of 
 > whom, say, use the PTT ISP), the provider would be better off using 
 > surrogates in the US rather than surrogates in the non-PTT's network. The 
 > second thing that bothers me is how we represent regions in any kind of 
 > protocol. I suppose we could use ISO two-letter country codes, but that's 
 > just binary. (You're either in fr or you're not.) There's certainly no 
 > algorithmic way to determine proximity. E.164 country codes (for telephone 
 > numbers) might do a little better, since the first digit generally 
 > represents a region, but there are a lot of worms in that can.
 > 
 > Would we be better off referring to autonomous systems rather than regions 
 > or countries? It seems more relevant to the problem at hand, and there is 
 > an unambiguous identifier. Of course, algorithmic determination of 
 > proximity is still a problem.
 > 
 > 
 > ____________________________________________________________________
 > Stephen Thomas                                       +1 770 671 1888
 > TransNexus, Chief Technical Officer    stephen.thomas@transnexus.com
 > 
 >