[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: comments on draft-py-multi6-gapi-00.txt

On Thursday, Feb 6, 2003, at 09:02 Canada/Eastern, Pekka Savola wrote:


I'd like to expand on one particular point:

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

If we could pass a law that every local government in the world
had to set up a monopoly IXP for its area, we might be able to
obtain enough congruence between geography and topology. But I
don't expect that any time soon.

.. IXP does not have to have a monopoly AFAICS, more specifics can be
advertised in every IXP.
This assumes there will always be IXPs. Today, the "IXP business model" is a concept of the developed world, and even there it is not relevant when we consider the largest ISPs, for whom peering is most definitely a business decision rather than a technical one.

From Kathmandu, Nepal, traffic to India travels to Singapore by satellite, across the pacific to the US, across the US, across the Atlantic, up to another satellite, and down to India. Packets go round the world once and into space twice, despite the fact that Nepal and India share a geopolitical border.

Interconnecting countries in South Asia and other developing regions is most definitely a governmental policy issue, and not a technical issue (the technical case for direct interconnection is trivial, and yet there is no direct interconnection). It might take governments twenty years to decide that fibre across the land border is a good idea, or they might not decide to do it at all.

Any routing system that relies on (geopolitically) local interconnection better be able to accommodate frequent departures from that model. There are a lot of people in South Asia, and the infrastructure is growing a lot faster than governments are able to think, never mind legislate.


Joe