December 2005 Archives

Peering matters. Earlier in the year, Cogent and Level (3) had a wee tiff over peering. Level (3) turned off its connections to Cogent for a few days as part of a strategy of negotiating new terms of interconnections. Politicians clamored to offer new, and ill-considered regulation of large-carrier interconnection. In the process, politicians and much of the media revealed the depths of their ignorance about how the Internet works.

The organization, character and structure of net interconnections affect everything about how the Internet works (and sometimes doesn't work), and it is at the core of the work that we do here at Renesys. Peering (settlement-free interconnection) is a significant part of that. Without making sense of peering now, almost nothing else I write about or refer to in the future will make sense. So what is peering and why does it matter so much? What does it have to do with Internet architecture?

One year ago today TTNet in Turkey (AS9121) pretended to be the entire Internet. And unfortunately for the rest of the Internet, many large network providers believed them (or at least believed them in part). As far as anyone knows, it was a mistake, not a malicious act. But the consequences were far from benign: for several hours a large number of Internet users were unable to reach a large number of Internet sites. Twelve months later we can take a look at what happened, and whether we've learned much in the intervening time.

So Earthlink is buying New Edge Networks for $144m (lots of references, but this should give you the basics). Most people have heard of Earthlink, once a dialup provider who has been trying to get a solid high-speed strategy since about 2000. But many haven't heard of New Edge. Let's take a look at what we know about both players.

This is my first blog, so you'll have to bear with me. Of course, like everyone even vaguely connected to the Internet, I've been aware of blogs for a very long time. I've got lots of friends with blogs and I've even thought about starting one, but never managed to. I think I even read a blog once; or maybe not.

I admire the Net for the way in which it allows ordinary people (and a few extraordinary people) to produce content and to directly deliver that content to an audience. "Disintermediation" was what we used to call that--a long word for "cutting out the middle man". Blogs can certainly do that. But they also have a tendency to be self-centered, myopic and frequently boring. I'll try to keep those normal, human characteristics out of these posts. Blogs worth reading are typically blogs worth writing. I'm hoping that this will be one of those.