7th Gigapop Geeks BOF Dan Magorian & Jon-Paul Herron, Cochairs Welcome!! The forum where Gigapop/RON operators can rant, rave, and be politically incorrect about current hot technical topics. And these days, figure out how we’re actually going to get things to work given the politics is unlikely to settle. This room is “CIO-free”. But many techies are managers. Blast from the past: the 1 st meeting was in Jan 04 in HI, and the topic was “NLR fanout: How the heck are we going to do this?” Last summer in WI we were still talking about more or less the same topic, albeit from two competing backbones. Kind of sad, the lack of progress. This time, the community is solidly entrenched into two camps, the I2 and IU folks are scramming on Newnet rollout, and everyone is thoroughly sick of the whole state of politics with no end in sight. People beyond sad: mad.

Tonight we’re trying something different: NTAC Commodity WG face-to-face We put together the NTAC Commodity Transit and Peering WG with this BOF. Idea is that anyone with an informed/uninformed opinion welcome to chime in, but esp WG members. I2 represented by Matt Davy and Steve Wallace, well known to everyone from IU and Abilene. Jon-Paul has been demoted to Nominal Co-chair until he takes a turn standing up here again. 8-> News: I2 has apparently rethought their Transit offering (originally Level3), in part responding to backpressure from the StateNet meeting last week. That’s fine because we hadn’t given that much thought yet anyway! Lots of folks were cool on it anyway: lots of concerns about potential overlap with the Quilt ISP activities, whether real or imagined.

Now Seems the Right Time for Someone from I2 or IU to make a Statement about it I wasn’t at StateNets in AZ, and only heard a few bits about it afterwards. But I do want to reinforce something I’ve heard before, that still seems to be kicking around: –We’re all in favor of understanding RON and StateNet business models, and ISP impacts. Doing a survey. –BUT, I have little sympathy for people still assuming that they have some exclusive service territory, and that they have some kind of right to guaranteed customers and markups. Anyone can move in and grab “your” customers. So competitive rates essential. –If someone’s bent because they can’t keep charging $100/mb/m, get a grip and join the 21 st century! (Steve Wallace talked on peering and transit)

So where were we on the Commodity Peering WG Discussion? Matt Davy and Steve Wallace have given good talks on the calls about the State of the Transit Prototype Test. RFC2547 L3 VPNs used, people seem happy, more joining. Some folks wanting use of a separate ASN so not confused with “the net previously known as Abilene”, not easy to do with RFC2547. Marketing/purchasing differentiation vs actual technical concern? Other approaches? Need lot more on peering strategies. Nobody’s beat Dan up yet about “This group should just endorse TransitRail!” Either people are more understanding of the politics and mission than I thought (doubtful), or maybe they just haven’t caught up with me yet.

Next item: The Survey Develop a taxonomy of common ISP service delivery technologies and models Idea was to talk to a lot of RON chief engineers, figure out how their networks and business models for ISP resale work, and listen to concerns. Introduced this at I2 Chicago MM. Jose Dominguez of OR Gigapop and Jen Leasure of the Quilt offered to help. Had some conf calls, so now we’re loosely coordinated and ready to survey! NOT a formal Quilt survey. I’m as bad about turning those in as anyone. Jen agreed that we’re drilling down into more technical depth than the Quilt had in mind for business model case studies. Names and who’s doing what isn’t really the point.

So what is the point of a taxonomy? For example, many RONs deliver “one size fits all” in which ISPs and R&E nets are mixed together and all customers get that product. If they have burstable contracts with their ISPs, low-cost transit peerings could potentially save them money. By contrast, more and more RONs such as MAX use MPLS 2547 vpns to deliver ISP service delivering ISP service via semi-separate pipes. If they use a “cost-plus” business model, these RONs stand to potentially lose revenue from “low-cost” transit instead of saving money. Other RONs have no physical distribution of ISP service, just act as VARs, ordering coops, etc. The idea is to boil these down to common models & impacts.

So here are some starter questions (so far; haven’t coordinated with Jose yet). How does your RON or GP resell ISP? –Do you resell it directly, or administrative service only? –Who resells it: the RON/GP itself or separate group? –Technical delivery (mixed together w/ one routing table, RFC2547, separate routers, etc) Which kind of routers? –For folks using RFC2547, what are your vrfs? VRs? –How do you charge for it (“one size fits all”, a la carte service pricing, etc)? Available to non-members? –Work well overall? Problems? What would you change if you were designing it today (lessons learned)?

More questions Higher-ed settlement-free transit peering services (“Rails”) –Do they fit into your plans, save your GP/RON money? –How do you contrast the approaches/benefits, as you understand them? Is their approach on target, or waste of time? Have you had clear info from them? –Is your GP/RON likely to join? Which one? Both? Are these the right questions? Given the politics, does this need to be anonymous, both in collection and in reporting? (people agreed anonymous)