more on VeriSign update -- some numbers

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
> Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 04:02:11 -0500
> From: "Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS" <billstewart () att com>
> Subject: RE: [IP] VeriSign update -- some numbers
> To: dave () farber net, karl () cavebear com
>
>
> Dave - Assuming that Karl's numbers are right, his conclusions are wrong.
> (What Verisign is doing is still bogus, of course... he's not wrong about 
> that.)
> 20 Million messages/day is about 1000/sec during the busy hour,
> and if they're 17KB of bloated Javascript, that's about 135 megabits/sec.
>
> That means that Verisign has to _buy_ about an extra OC3 of capacity from 
> its ISPs,
> and probably 1/3 of that traffic goes to them, 1/3 to other Tier 1 ISP's 
> that they have
> big peering pipes with, and 1/3 goes to Tier 2 and smaller ISPs.
> So the ~4500 small ISPs are carrying that extra 45 Mbps of traffic, about 
> 10kbps each.
> It's not zero cost, but it's pretty close, and if your margin's that thin, 
> null route Verisign's server.
> Verisign's probably paying $15-30K/month to their ISPs for it.
>
> The real costs are the bandwidth and support for broken email,
> mostly extra bouncegrams that result from SMTP servers contacting Verisign
> and getting rejected deliveries instead of being able to reject 
> misdirected mail earlier
> based on DNS queries.   There'll also be extra costs from spam,
> because this breaks some of the tools used by spam blockers,
> and Verisign will also get hit by spam to mistaken domain names,
> especially if some spammer tries to dictionary-spam yet-another-typo.com.
> Some people have spammer-bait web pages with lots of bogus email addresses -
> in the past this was considered a bit rude because of the extra load it 
> placed on the root DNS servers,
> but Verisign's increased that load now.
>
>                 Bill Stewart   bill.stewart () pobox com
>
> Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, not my employer's.

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