Hey yawl. On Mon, 15 Jun 1998, Joe Abley wrote:
Well, it's been a while, and there hasn't been much comment on this. Here we go, then: a proposal. Feel free to shoot me down in flames if this doesn't sit happily with anybody else :)
1. Establish a second emulated LAN on CityLink for BGP peering between cooperating network operators. This will consist of a series of bilateral agreements between individual network operators. No customers should connect to ISPs over this network - this will be a "clean" IP-only network.
While I appreciate that the ISP's primary desire is an interconnect to exchange data with their "peers" (in the loosest sense of the word) on a national basis, I would really like to see an exchange set up in Wellington that also allowed any local organisation to peer on the WIX for *local* traffic. Specifically, the shared ethernet that the ISP's are attached to in Wellington has some 50 other organisations on ir, most at 10Mb/s, some at 100Mb/s. On a daily basis we get the "I'm sending data to some other user of Citylink, and it's really slow" grumble, generally because their traffic is going via Waikato, or Auckland, or wherever. Peering between the ISP's should fix most of these problems. Increasingly, however, we're hearing "we're a customer of ISP X, we're sending data to another customer of ISP X, and performance is still rotten", which peering won't necessarily fix, because it isn't an inter ISP issue. With the advent of more 100Mb/s+ connections, and the increasing desire of local organisations to use Citylink to move massive amounts (A2 full colour spreads, for eg) of data between themselves, this situation isn't likely to improve. Therefore it seems desirable that Citylink attached organisations be able to communicate amongst themselves, without needing to pass through an ISP's router. So, while the ISP's do need a bilateral peering point where individual operators can choose whether to (in effect) carry other ISP's data on their national network, I would like to see a tandem system implemented where local Citylink users can share routes for locally attached networks amongst themselves. I'd also observe that VLAN's aren't (yet) a product of Citylink, (although our current backbone switches do support them), and probably won't be until somebody asks. So it behooves the ISP's concerned to get a request into Richard and Alan so that they can get the product development wheels in motion.
2. To make (1) as smooth as possible, individual operators should make efforts to install up-to-date route entries and associated policy into the Merit (Route Arbiter) routing registry. This will also help with a similar operation on NZIX.
Citylink are/can provide hardware to make a local RA registry a reality, which is presumably necessary if non AS numbered entities want to join the IX?
3. The Wellington peering network will be called "WIX". ISOCNZ have reserved wix.net.nz for this purpose. NetLink have offered to keep the zone fed and watered; any operator should be able to perform zone transfers for wix.net.nz and NS records for that operators nameserver will be added by rough concensus (i.e. as long as the nameserver in question seems to be up most of the time :)
4. A class C network will be obtained from ISI by ISOCNZ. This costs US$500. ISOCNZ will bill a proportion of this amount to all the initial participants in WIX. The corresponding in-addr.arpa zone will be run by NetLink on behalf of the peering community, in much the same way as wix.net.nz.
With a bit of arm twisting, I could probably squeeze a couple of unused pre-CIDR Class C's out of WCC - would that be a useful/cheaper alternative? Citylink would (I imagine) also be happy to act as a neutral party for DNS maintenance or ISI billing. Cheers Si Simon Blake simon(a)citylink.co.nz +64 25 300 825 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog