On Wed, 13 Jun 2012, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:
It's worth noting that Chorus are constrained to Layers 1 and 2 only - no routing!
Which I personally would argue for various reasons is an untenable and ridiculous technical position to force anyone to take.
It sounds ridiculous until you consider how many corner cases it solves. If Chorus and/or the Local Fibre Companies are allowed to offer routed (L3) traffic, then: - whose routing table do you use? - are they allowed to charge a premium (or a discount) for using "their" routing table rather than "yours"? - are they allowed to effectively charge less for a L3 service than for a L2 service? - are they allowed to charge "as if" all data went via a nominal aggregation point? - are they allowed to charge by byte (traffic), rather than by bit-per-second (bandwidth)? - if they're not allowed to charge for traffic, are they allowed to pretend your pipe is sized according to how you actually use it? - are they allowed to pretend you have multiple pipes, depending on route egress points? (e.g. peering / national / international) - if L3, then why not caching at L4? - are they allowed to charge more (or less) for cached data? - if data is routed to an any-cast address, how do you decide how much to charge for it? There are just *so* many levers that could be pulled to make life difficult for a "non preferred" wholesaler in such an environment. Writing a rule-book that would allow L3 routing but disallow the various shenanigans would be a tall ask for a bunch of techos, and pretty much impossible for a bunch of politicos. -Martin