nanog mailing list archives

Re: Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity


From: Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 09:36:35 -0700


On Jul 28, 2014, at 9:28 AM, William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:
The data set suffers three flaws:

Depending on your point of view, a lot more than three, undoubtedly.

1. It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the Internet.

There are an infinite number of things it’s not representative of, but it also doesn’t claim to be representative of 
them.  Traffic flows on the Internet is a different survey of a different thing, but if someone can figure out how to 
do it well, I would be very supportive of their effort.  It's a _much_ more difficult survey to do, since it requires 
getting people to pony up their unanonymized netflow data, which they’re a lot less likely to do, en masse, than their 
peering data.  We’ve been trying to figure out a way to do it on a large and representative enough scale to matter for 
twenty years, without too much headway.  The larger the Internet gets, the more difficult it is to survey well, so the 
problem gets harder with time, rather than easier.

That having been said, kudos for the excellent research. As far as
objective numbers go, yours are more thorough than any others I've
seen.

Thank you.  We look forward to your participation in the next one!  :-)

                                -Bill




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