Learn How The Internet Works
HUBS AND SPOKES
Networks | Broadband | Ports
There are 1,000 megabits in one gigabit and 1,000 gigabits in one terabit of data transmitted.
2026 SOMEONE BUILT A MAP THAT SHOWS EXACTLY WHERE EVERY POWER
PLANT, TRANSMISSION LINE, SUBSTATION & DATA CENTER SITS ON THE
US GRID
https://opengridworks.com/power-plants
all on one interactive map. all free
you can see how the grid is laid out... where the datacenters cluster... which transmission corridors carry the load... where the high-capacity connection points are
zoom into any region and the whole picture comes into focus why energy costs what it costs, why data centers go where they go, why some states are power exporters and others aren't
this is the kind of infrastructure visibility that used to require expensive industry reports
now it's one tab
How the Internet Travels Across Oceans
2019
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html
#Hurricane Sandy hurts Cloud Internet Infrastructure
10/31/12
: Learn How the Internet Works - Hubs and Spokes
The Vast World off Fraudulent Routing As network security engineers have attempted to categorize blocks of IP addresses associated with spam or malware for subsequent filtering at their firewalls, the bad guys have had to evolve to continue to target their victims. Since routing on the global Internet is based entirely on trust, it's relatively easy to commandeer IP address space that belongs to someone else . In other words, if the bad guys' IP space is blocked, well then they can just steal someone else's and continue on as before. In an attempt to cover their tracks, these criminals will sometimes originate routes using autonomous system numbers (ASNs) that they don't own either.
BAD ROUTE PROPAGATION - U SE PROTECTION IF PEERING PROMISCUOUSLY
IETF standard for RPKI-based AS path verification.
China Telecom—National LambdaRail Although our final example isn't recent, it is worth mentioning in this discussion. During the big China Telecom routing leak of April 2010 that caused an international stir, it is interesting to note where the bogus routes announced by China Telecom (AS23724) propagated the farthest. Before it ceased operations earlier this year, National LambdaRail (NLR) was a “high-speed national computer network owned and operated by the U.S. research and education community.” NLR also had a peering relationship with China Telecom, the state telecom of China. When NLR received the bogus origination announcements from its Chinese peer, it accepted them and routed traffic to China that was intended for numerous other locations around the world.
Resolved: National Lambda Rail (NLR ) to cease operation. Last updated on February 18, 2014 at 8:15AM Along with connection to the commodity Internet, Penn State connects to two other national networking infrastructures, Internet2 and NLR. ITS has received notification that NLR will cease operations as of 7:00 PM EST on Monday, February 17th. Commodity Internet and Internet2 will continue normal operations. ITS anticipates no impact to Penn State connectivity or traffic flows. If any impact is detected, either with connectivity to a non-PSU host site or with access to any PSU host from outside the PSU domain, please contact the NOC to open an incident. For more information, please contact Network Operations Center (814-865-4662).
11/6/18
CHINA TELECOM'S INTERNET TRAFFIC MISDIRECTIONS
Great piece by @dangoodin001 on BGP hijacking. BGP hijacking is
never just an accident or snarfu, it's a calculated move to consume
what you usually aren't allowed to.
BORDER GATEWAY PROTOCOL — Strange snafu misroutes domestic US
Internet traffic through China Telecom Telecom with ties to China's
government misdirected traffic for two and a half years. For almost
a week late last year, the improper routing caused some US domestic
Internet communications to be diverted to mainland China before
reaching their intended destination, Doug Madory, a researcher
specializing in the security of the Internet's global BGP routing
system, told Ars. As the following traceroute from December 3, 2017
shows, traffic originating in Los Angeles first passed through a
China Telecom facility in Hangzhou, China, before reaching its final
stop in Washington, DC. The problematic route, which is visualized
in the graphic above, was the result of China Telecom inserting
itself into the inbound path of Verizon Asian Pacific. Madory said
the improper routing he reported finally stopped after he “expended
a great deal of effort to stop it in 2017.”
China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection
BY Doug Madory His report
went on to endorse a proposed standard known as RPKI-based AS path
verification. The mechanism, had it been deployed, would have
stopped some of the events Madory documented, he said.
SUBMARINE CABLE MAP reveals the 550,000 miles of cable hidden under the ocean that power the internet . Every time you visit a web page or send an email, data is being sent and received through an intricate cable system that stretches around the globe. Since the 1850s, we've been laying cables across oceans to become better connected. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables constantly transmitting data between nations.
2016 Facebook and Microsoft are laying a massive cable across the middle of the Atlantic. Dubbed MAREA—Spanish for “tide”—this giant underwater cable will stretch from Virginia to Bilbao, Spain, shuttling digital data across 6,600 kilometers of ocean. Providing up to 160 terabits per second of bandwidth—about 16 million times the bandwidth of your home Internet connection—it will allow the two tech titans to more efficiently move enormous amounts of information between the many computer data centers and network hubs that underpin their popular online services.
SUBMARINE CABLE MAP 2014
TeleGeography Maps -- Undersea cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean -
Crossing-2 (or AC-2), are the main data lifelines between
continents.
How NSA and GCHQ are tapping internet cables
NIGELLA - GERONTIC - INCENSER - WINDSTOP
12/1/14 The NSA's fourth-largest cable tapping program, codenamed INCENSER, pulls its data from just one single source: a submarine fiber optic cable linking Asia with Europe.
Until now, it was only known that INCENSER was a sub-program of WINDSTOP and that it collected some 14 billion pieces of internet data a month. The latest revelations now say that these data were collected with the help of the British company Cable & Wireless (codenamed GERONTIC, now part of Vodafone) at a location in Cornwall in the UK, codenamed NIGELLA.
For the first time, this gives us a view on the whole interception
chain, from the parent program all the way down to the physical
interception facility. Here we will piece together what is known
about these different stages and programs from recent and earlier
publications.
Hurricane Sandy Hurts Internet Cloud Infrastructure
10/26/15
Russian Ships Near Data Cables
Are Too Close for U.S. Comfort some American military and
intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack
those lines in times of tension or conflict.
Internet Infrastructure
10/2/14 Global Infrastructure explained by Retired NSA Technical Director William Binney.
8/12/14 Google helps build 'Faster' cable under Pacific Ocean with a host of Asian telecoms giants - China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit, KDDI, and Sinapoure's SingTel. The cable, dubbed Faster, will connect the US with Japan and cost about $300m (£179m; 225m euros). "The Faster cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world." The cable will connect Chikura and Shima in Japan to the major hubs on the west coast of the US - Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.
9 things you didn't know about Google's undersea cable
About 99% of all transoceanic Internet data is sent via undersea cables.
The Australian Signals Directorate, is in a partnership with British, American and Singaporean intelligence agencies to tap undersea fibre optic telecommunications cables that link Asia, the Middle East and Europe and carry much of Australia's international phone and internet traffic. One former Australian Defence intelligence officer told Fairfax Media that access to submarine fibre optic cable traffic ''gives the 5-eyes [intelligence alliance] and our partners like Singapore a stranglehold on communications across the Eastern Hemisphere''. A major GCHQ interception program, codenamed Tempora, that involves harvesting all data, emails sent and received, instant messages, calls, passwords and more, entering and exiting Britain via undersea fibre-optic cables.The SEA-ME-WE-3 is one of the most important undersea cables accessed by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency. The Australian Signals Directorate and the highly secretive Security and Intelligence Division of Singapore's Ministry of Defence also play key roles in intercepting communications traffic through Asia.
Carriers and ISPs use the cables to pump data across the Atlantic.
Two of the major gateways are in Brookhaven, N.Y., (on Long Island)
and in northern New Jersey, where the cables come ashore.
NYC Data Centers
:
Transatlantic fiber lands at about 10 different places in
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Long Island and New Jersey
that, after having landed, all goes to one of two facilities.
Telecom companies use carrier hotels to interconnect networks to allow data sharing and users of one network to connect with those of another.
There is a high probability that every time you go on a Web site - your Internet traffic passes through 111 8th Ave. at some point.
These 2 buildings are critical to the nation's infrastructure located in lower Manhattan which serves as the major network hubs for the U.S . The buildings, known as carrier hotels, are a 2.9 million square foot structure at 111 8th Ave. , and a 1.8 million square foot facility at 60 Hudson St.
Telex
has Interconnection and data center company sites and has
co-location facilities at 60 Hudson as well as 111 8th Ave. New York
City.
NYC1
,
NYC2
,
NJR1
OPERATIONS CONTACT: 888.835.9832 or TELXTECHSUPPORT@TELX.COM
MOBILE (612) 860-8789 or RSTERBENZ@TELX.COM
Atlantic Metro: LGA1 (325 Hudson Street) LGA4 (121 Varick Street))
LGA1 connects to LGA6.
Low Lying Manhattan's FLOOD Zone A
Major flooding n NYC Data Centers Hurricane Sandy
75 Broad Street, NY
Internap
|
Peer 1
|
Navisite
and other data center providers. ALSO 8th Avenue facility houses
several data centers in the low-lying Zone A of Manhattan, was
severely impacted, by Hurricane Sandy.
25 Broadway (Telehouse colocation provider )
lower Manhattan has its data center in Chelsea and at the Staten
Island Teleport.
Data centers at Google-owned Carrier Hotel 111 8th Ave. NY . Telx Colocation and interconnection specialist is the largest service provider at 60 Hudson Street , one of the the leading carrier hotels in Manhattan operates some 490,000 square-feet of data center space at 111 8th Ave building.
Equinix
, Voxel/Internap, XO Communications, INIT7, a Swiss provider of IPv6
infrastructure all run data centes at 111 8th Ave and 75 Broad
Street in Manhattan
- Both 75 Broad and 33 Whitehall were located in the “Zone A” flood zone.
The Internet Key Exchange (IKE)
IP Security Protocol Working Group (IPSEC)
HUBS AND SPOKES
INTERNET READER
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
- Global Internet Primer, Architecture, Finance, Governance, Demand, Voice, What Next?
- International Internet Bandwidth - Providers, Connectivity, Exchanges,
- International Internet Indicators - Network Metrics
Reference
GLOBAL INTERNET PRIMER:
FINANCE
Who pays for the Internet? "The answer is either really long or
really short depending on what you're trying to say," says Scott
Bradner, a leading Internet expert at Harvard University. The
Internet does not have a set economic model, so there's no standard
way network providers are remunerated for the resources they use.
End of story.
The longer answer is more complicated, precisely because the
Internet's provisioning model is not static. Whereas a typical call
over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) involves two or
three different networks, a typical Internet transmission may
involve five or ten. And the connectionless transmission technology
on which the Internet is based also means that the role of each of
these networks cannot easily be predicted in advance. Smaller
networks typically pay larger networks for connectivity, but many
larger networks themselves exchange their traffic without charge
under a peering, sender-keeps-all basis (see Figure 1, "A Primer on
Peering"). They seek to recoup their network costs primarily from
their end users and their downstream ISP customers -- not always
from other networks, as in the telephony world. To understand why
the Internet's schemes for funding international networks are so
different from the traffic- based settlement arrangements over the
PSTN, a brief digression on technology is useful.
The Connectionless Network
Traditional phone networks
, built for voice communications,
switch or assign a dedicated end-to-end circuit for every call
.
That is reliable
, but oriented heavily toward a limited set of applications whose
bandwidth usage is fairly steady: every connection needs its own
circuit. Minute-by-minute and circuit-by-circuit payment methods
consequently developed to compensate network providers.
The Internet
is a radical departure from this pattern. It
is based on packet switching
: no dedicated connection is required, and a dedicated route doesn't
have to be set up between sender and receiver. Instead, all
communication is converted to digital format, broken up into chunks
of data called packets or datagrams, given an address, and sent out
into the network -- packet by packet. What's most significant is
that the path each packet takes may be radically different: all they
have in common is that they end up in the same place, ready to be
reassembled into a coherent message. That makes it hard to bill
Internet communications in the way that traditional phone
communications are billed. But it is more efficient for moving
traffic around when that traffic may consist of a tiny message sent
one moment, a huge graphics file the next, and then nothing for a
few minutes -- what traffic engineers call "bursty traffic," because
it comes in sudden bursts.
Some have compared the process to mailing a book through a postal
service that accepts only postcards: each page must be sent
separately, and arrives individually; the receiver must reassemble
the pages back into the right order before reading.
When first proposed in the 1960s by Paul Baran, in the U.S., and
separately by Donald Davies in the United Kingdom
-- and later refined in the early 1970s by
pioneers like
Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf
- it sounded like a crazy idea. But it worked. (For an engaging history of the period, see Peter Salus' book, Casting The Net .) Since the early principles of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol were published by Kahn and Cerf in a paper entitled " A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication " ( IEEE Transactions on Communication, May 1974 ), packet delivery has not changed much. Along the way, routers
- computers acting as "smart" switches, as opposed to the automatic forwarding of bridge switches
- still store and forward packets.
After forwarding, if the first router doesn't receive acknowledgment
that the packet has arrived safely at its destination, it resends
the packet. The protocol self-adjusts to achieve the best possible
service; routers send packets as fast as they can with the lowest
error rate. And in socialistic fashion, all packets are treated
equally, on a best-effort basis.
It wasn't very reliable, and still isn't
. If there's a lot of congestion on a single route, packets are
dropped -- not such a good thing for time-sensitive traffic such as
telephone calls. But the original designers cleverly built in
robustness. Because
routers are simply dedicated computers
, they can make sophisticated decisions about how to route traffic
most efficiently. And when the network is congested or a link lost,
they can find out about it and choose another route -- so that if a
backhoe digs up a cable, or a fishing trawler cuts one in two, it is
a problem, but not necessarily the end of the line. With network
information and topology that is well-distributed, properly
configured, and actively maintained, the Internet should be able to
route around any central point of failure.
With the basic architecture and design principles already in place,
the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) began funding data
networking pioneers at
13 supercomputing centers across the U.S. in 1985.
A nationwide circuit for the traffic was commissioned. The academic
institutions had to strike deals with local telecom providers to
lease local and regional circuits. More and more institutions sought
to be connected to the NSFNET backbone, the network's main transport
infrastructure.
Things moved quickly. As the network had grown, more and more uses
were found for it -- but as long as the
National Science Foundation
ran the backbone, its
Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
was the formal framework for what kind of traffic could run over its
facilities:
"NSFNET backbone services are provided to support open research and education in and between U.S. research and instructional institutions, plus research arms of for-profit firms when engaged in open scholarly communications and research. Use for other purposes is not acceptable."
In 1991
, three private IP networks
- General Atomics (CERFnet, now owned by MCI WorldCom),
- UUnet (now owned by MCI WorldCom), and
- Performance Systems International (PSInet) danced around the AUP by creating the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX, www.cix.org ), an open peering point for the exchange of network traffic.
The idea stuck. The Internet had proved its commercial viability; by 1992, the U.S. government wanted out, and the NSFNET's backbone transmission network was privatized
- and began to accept commercial traffic, marking what may have been the beginnings of the Internet as we now know it.
- Then, in 1994, the NSF commissioned four network access points (NAPs), essentially traffic exchange points similar in function to CIX, located in southern New Jersey, outside Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco.
All were run by different telecom operators. In a remarkably short
period of time, the basic ingredients of today's global Internet had
emerged.
Of course, an application from outside the traditional Internet
community would dramatically shake things up. The World Wide Web,
developed by Tim Berners-Lee and popularized around 1993, was soon
followed by the Mosaic browser, forerunner to Netscape. The
exponential growth the Internet had seen until then -- users and
host counts generally doubled annually -- hit massive proportions
and backbone traffic surged.
What You Pay Depends On What You Do
Back to the economics. Traffic, as we have seen, is routed over the
Internet on a virtual pathway without fixed routes or network
connections.
The physical networks which make up the Internet -- typically
leased circuits from telephone companies -- do interconnect,
though. And networks do exchange traffic. The economics of how
that happens are key to understanding who pays for what on the
Internet.
That said, the Internet industry has matured enough to make basic
distinctions between different categories of service providers or
ISPs. Doing so provides, in part, the answer to how international
infrastructure providers, such as telcos, are and will be
compensated.
The generic term "Internet service provider" (ISP) has become
meaningless.
It does not distinguish, for instance, between large international
ISPs (IISPs) with global infrastructure (such as MCI WorldCom or
PSINet), or local online providers that bundle content with the
access services they buy for their customers, such as EasyNet in
Europe (www.easynet.co.uk), AsahiNet in Japan (www.asahinet.or.jp),
or CAIS Internet (www.cais.net) in the U.S. Nor does it take into
account whether the service provider's customers are individual
users, who tend to request content; content providers who pay to
export data; or other transporters of data. These differences can
weigh heavily: unlike telecom finance, Internet cost recovery may
involve compensation both for transporting bits, and for the kind of
bits being carried -- content.
Better, then, to break down the industry into four classes:
- firms that specialize in Web site hosting,
- downstream ISPs who buy most of their long-haul backbone transit;
- online service providers which bundle Internet access with a focus on content and interface, and
- backbone ISPs.
The cost structure and the money flow is determined by the category
to which one belongs. And because most players belong to different
categories at different points in their activities -- even most
backbone ISPs tend to be downstream from someone else -- those cost
structures are complicated affairs. Taken together, though, the
worldwide market for Internet access is now big business: it was to
have grown from $25 billion in 1997 to more than $100 billion in
2000, according to Zona Research
Let's take a look at the components.
Content Hosting Providers
Web server "farms" emerged from the ISP industry itself, but are now
somewhat separate: companies have made Web hosting into a niche
business and are growing rapidly. The important fact is that their
traffic flow is mostly uni-directional -- the antithesis to the
bilateral, unmetered peering arrangements of old. Instead, the few
bits of data that trickle in when a user requests a Web page are
overwhelmed by the flood of outgoing audio, video, image, and text
objects. As a result, backbone ISPs demand that hosting providers,
which typically do not maintain a national network, purchase
connectivity from a backbone or downstream ISP whose customers seek
the content.
This can lead to conflict. Web hosting firms claim that backbone
ISPs are already compensated by their end customers, so that to seek
compensation from the content provider would mean a double payment.
The backbone ISP counters that it is forced to haul the content
provider's traffic on its own network to reach its customers -- and
it wouldn't need so much infrastructure if the server farm had its
own national network. Backbone ISPs thus only agree to accept a
server farm's traffic at a price.
In August 1998, a peering dispute erupted between GTE
Internetworking and Exodus over this very issue, and both firms'
customers came close to losing direct connection to one another.
Since then, the issue has continued to simmer. Though access
providers still have the upper hand in negotiating peering
agreements with content providers, the situation has evolved
considerably, and negotiations now typically depend on the perceived
value of the content to the access provider's customers.
Downstream ISPs
A similar logic is used for downstream ISPs, who provide Internet
access to even smaller providers, corporate customers, and end
users. The price of Internet connectivity varies by location and
amount of data. In late 1998, for example, a downstream ISP in
Cambridge, Massachusetts could lease a 45 Mbps circuit for $2,500
per month. But that paid only for the facilities required to meet
the gateway of an upstream backbone ISP. The price to connect with
the backbone, which lets the downstream ISP's customers reach other
destinations on the Internet -- this arrangement is usually known as
"transit," as opposed to "peering" (see Figure 2, "Exchanging
Traffic") -- can be as high as $30,000 per month.
While the connection fee may seem a crippling cost for U.S.-based
ISPs, service providers outside the U.S. must also pay for the cost
of an international private line if they wish to connect directly
with the Internet at its core. Such a connection does not come
cheaply -- trans-Pacific circuits, for example, were in 1998 going
for as much as $60,000 to $80,000 a month for a 45 Mbps line.
However, most downstream ISPs and large corporate users that
purchase Internet connectivity do not pay based on their actual
usage, bit by bit, but based on a usage profile, broken down into
different tiers. It would be too expensive and the tools too awkward
to meter and charge every data flow. Indeed, many Internet engineers
believe the cost of measuring and billing for exact usage could put
a debilitating premium on Internet service. Lest the dilemma seem
fanciful, consider the U.S. long distance telephone business. With
coast-to-coast U.S. rates of $0.07 a minute or less, up to 40
percent of the rate for long distance telephony may reflect the
costs of monitoring and monthly billing.
So on the Internet, the backbone ISP's network measures the overall
traffic pattern by glancing at the router's bytes in and bytes out
and charging the downstream ISP accordingly. This allows a customer
to lease a line with much more capacity than is ever used, pay asum
closer to the actual usage, and be assured that should traffic
spike, the line can meet the demand for an additional fee. The only
drawback with this approach is that it sets up an incentive for the
upstream ISP to overbook capacity, under the hopeful (and
reasonable) assumption that all customers do not generate peak loads
at once. At MindSpring Enterprises Inc. (www.mindspring.net, now
part of EarthLink), chief executive Charles Brewer said in 1999 that
30 percent of company costs derive from connectivity fees and 13
percent from customer service expenses. He expected a complete
reversal within five years, as bandwidth becomes a commodity and
ISPs must differentiate themselves more by the services they offer.
Online Service Providers
Online service providers like AOL earn revenues not by reselling
network transmission service, but by bundled Internet access with
proprietary content and specialized commerce, selling ads, and
providing users with the ease-of-use which comes from special
software interfaces and customer hot-lines. They are typically the
customers of upstream access and backbone providers, which also
manage the network points of presence (PoPs) accessed by dial-up
retail users. AOL, for example, has outsourced nearly all of its
network transmission needs to MCI WorldCom subsidiary UUNet, though
it maintains a multi-vendor strategy to ensure redundancy. Even
AT&T relied at one time on BBN's network, since acquired by GTE,
to connect leased-line commercial users.
The online service provider is either paid a flat monthly rate by
customers for unlimited service, or charges additional fees after a
set usage is exceeded. The real payoff is in the eyeballs and the
mouse-clicks -- selling specialty content and advertising space and
taking a share of e-commerce revenue. Data networking represents
online service providers' highest cost, apparently around 50 percent
of revenue. Significantly, however, marketing, customer support and
subscriber acquisition represent close to 35 percent of revenue.
Backbone ISPs
All networks are beholden to backbone ISPs -- be they content
hosting facilities, downstream ISPs, or online service providers --
either to furnish Internet connectivity or to manage the actual
network infrastructure. Nor are backbone ISPs an exclusive category.
While most network providers are increasingly specializing in
specific segments of the market, there are only a very few network
connectivity providers that aren't downstream from others.
Internationally, the same dynamic applies. Local downstream ISPs in
Asia, Europe and elsewhere need the larger, upstream networks, often
the incumbent telecom provider, for Internet connectivity. And big
Internet sharks outside the U.S. find themselves but tiny sardines
when they arrive on U.S. shores with their leased circuit dedicated
to IP traffic. They must strike an interconnection agreement with
one or more of the Internet backbone networks, just like a regional
U.S. ISP.
Some off-shore backbone ISPs have begun to acquire their own
national U.S. networks to obtain free peering. Most have not. In
1999, Japan's NTT tried to aggregate its traffic with the large
U.S.-based backbone ISP Verio, in which NTT had taken a ten percent
stake, and Qwest was keen to piggyback onto EUnet International's
peering agreements when the U.S. telecom upstart bought the
pan-European ISP in March 1998, forming what would become KPNQwest.
The emergence of backbone ISPs to provide connectivity to the
Internet
- indeed to determine what actually constitutes Internet connectivity
- is a relatively recent phenomenon. Not surprisingly, there's controversy surrounding their role in the Internet food chain. When the Internet first evolved, ISPs were closer in size and swapped traffic freely. Early Net applications, like file transfer protocol, led to more or less symmetrical traffic among ISPs. In contrast, the Web creates a split between the end users, who import data, and content companies, who are data exporters.
That's new. In the early days, the ganglia of network interconnections were so complex
- since everyone accepted any other network's traffic
- that the only way Internet engineers could map the Internet's topology and traffic flow was simply to draw a cloud. Today, however, the terrific infrastructural investment, and major traffic imbalances due to the emergence of Web hosting firms, have meant that the practice of settlement-free peering is waning. The two noticeable exceptions are that local ISPs peer with their siblings at local exchange points, and that the very biggest backbone ISPs
- the Tier Ones who can move traffic pretty much anywhere without buying long-haul transit from someone else -- continue to peer among themselves. Peering, in other words, is for those who are your peers
- or appear to be.
The point: scale matters. Unless your network is very big and very fast and upgraded continuously, you are always somebody else's customer -- which is one reason why regulators, otherwise leery of interfering with the Internet's dramatic growth, have pondered stepping in to try and keep the backbone market competitive. Whether or not they do so depends on a still-brewing argument over whether or not Internet backbones, currently treated as enhanced services, should be reclassified as public telecommunications infrastructure. If so, then companies operating Internet backbones would be common carrier operators, and therefore required to provide fair and non-discriminatory terms to ISPs seeking interconnection. If not, then as enhanced services providers they continue to be able to pick and choose with whom they connect and on what terms. Like many of the hard questions about an increasingly pervasive Internet, the regulatory status of backbone networks -- basic telecom facility or enhanced ("private") data pipe -- remain unresolved.
2006 NOW WE HAVE THE ISSUES OF NETWORK NEUTRALITY AND ACCESS EXPLAINED.
2010 Greg's Cable Map
is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about
the undersea communications infrastructure.
The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further
information was gathere by simply googling and transcribing as much
data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded
format. I hope you find the resource useful and any constructive
criticism is welcome. The data is available in ArcGIS .shp file
format on request, so long as it's not going to be used for profit.
https://www.cablemap.info/
Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever
The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online backbone organizations. At the top of the root server hierarchy is the "A" root server, which every 12 hours generates a critical file that tells the other 12 servers what Internet domains exist and where they can be found. One rung below the root servers in the Internet hierarchy are the servers that house Internet domains such as dot-com, dot-biz and dot-info. The DNS is built so that eight or more of the world's 13 root servers must fail before ordinary Internet users start to see slowdowns. Vixie said it was an attack against all 13 servers, only four or five of the 13 servers were able to withstand the attack and remain available to legitimate Internet traffic throughout the strike.The root servers, about 10 of which are located in the United States, serve as a sort of master directory for the Internet.
2013 NSA Says It Can't Search Its Own Emails: Lacks the Technology
There are actually some email server topologies where it is difficult (by design or coincidence) to search emails by content or sender. I'm talking about hub-and-spoke systems where a central server (or farm) deals with the outside world (the hub), and distributes email to servers that individual users connect to (the spokes). Certain entities have legal obligations for email communication privacy, e.g. not being able to send certain data to or from the outside world or only within their own systems. Law firms, some banks, stock exchanges, those are the ones that I know of for sure. Some of them do this by having rings of servers in addition to the hub-and-spoke architecture. So you have the central hub, and then it talks down the spokes to in multiple layers, and users that connect to servers at different layers of rings can have their senders/recipients checked against various policies, implemented in a number of ways technically. These systems are NOT easy to debug (I've helped fix some before), and depending on what you are logging at various servers on the way in and out, and for how long, it may not even be easy to search the "meta-data", and searching email content is not going to be easy. It will be progressively more difficult the more layers of rings you have in the system and how short the time logs are kept (sometimes such meta-data itself, due to traffic analysis, is considered protected or classified, and is not kept, or at least not on the servers as it would normally).
So no, they might not be lying, except when they say that it is due to their email technology being old. On the contrary, it would be because they are probably using methods that would provide the most secrecy and make centralized searching of email content or sender meta-data difficult by design. Of course they wouldn't admit to what their email architecture is, and that they probably have chosen increased secrecy in the trade-off between ease of use and security. There are of course some agencies that have classified information on them that DON'T use a system with such a design (the one I am aware of is the Whitehouse, and least in the past, from publicly available information on "bad things" people there have done that has come to light), but I know that at least one stock exchange (not users of it, but the exchange itself) uses such a complicated system and that searching its email data would be very difficult. Some domestic utilities use such a system and I know that at least 1 of the 3 largest banks in Mexico do. Those are just systems that I have first hand knowledge of from upgrading or fixing them. Note that "difficult" does not equal "impossible", but if an organization with such an architecture didn't set up a way to do it ahead of time, it would take work to do it (and if logs of sending pairs are gone, it'd take a lot of time).
Hubs and Spokes Email
Excellent email reader by Al Vezza of MIT