A Brittle Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: RJ Atkinson <rja () extremenetworks com>
Date: October 31, 2008 10:05:34 AM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: A Brittle Internet

Dave,

 A curious phenomenon of the past decade or so has
been the increasing brittleness of the Internet.

 Folks with a circuit networking background seem
to be fundamentally uncomfortable reasoning about
packet networking.  One result is the increasing demand
for, and deployment of, circuit networking overlays,
such as MPLS L2 VPNs, MPLS L3 VPNs, PBB-TE/PBT,
and other things.[1]

 Use of these technologies greatly increases both
the deployment and operational costs of the network,
while visibly reducing the resilience of the network.

 Fifteen years ago, a fibre cut (e.g. Northridge earthquake)
resulted in IP routing dynamically discovering new paths
and a remarkable degree of Internet connectivity remaining.
Today, a similar event would leave many folks disconnected,
due to their reliance on circuit-like deployments over IP,
even though an IP path remained, would be discovered by
IP routing protocols, and could be used except for the
reliance on circuit-emulation technologies of various
sorts.

 It seems to me that somewhere the overall educational
system has some gaps.  Communications techs/engineers
coming out of technical school or college/university
ought to have learned about packet networking and be
comfortable reasoning about it.  Sadly, that seems
often not to be the case at present.

Yours,

Ran
rja () extremenetworks com

Disclaimer: Views expressed are the author's own;
he never speaks for his employer.

[1] Note that this use of MPLS is a bit different from
"tactical" use of MPLS for short-term Traffic Engineering
whilst waiting for new capacity to be brought online
someplace.






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