abilene -> he.net routing humor

[Joe St Sauver]

Hi,

#I'm somewhat new to this list, but this is the second thread about Abilene
#that I've seen which implies that Abilene provides crappy transit and should
#increase its peering.  I'm not sure if people on this list are aware, but 
#Abilene is not a transit ISP.  It is a private network interconnecting research 
#institutions in the US, the US government and related organiztions, and other
#international research networks.  In our v4 BGP table, Abilene has about 
#16,000 routes whereas each of our transit providers has about 160,000.  This
#is intentional and, clearly, isn't considered a transit provider into the
#Internet's default-free zone.

Abilene's IPv6 routing policies (and their IP multicast policies for that
matter) intentionally differ from their unicast IPv4 routing policies. 

For official confirmation of this see Rick's presentation at
http://ipv6.internet2.edu/Internet2-IPv6-Update.pdf at slide 11
("IPv6 Peering Policy -- open peering policy, with transit if desired --
different from IPv4")

#The University that I work for has several commodity transit providers as well
#as a connection with Abilene.  The reason why you are seeing horrible transit 
#via Abilene to the commodity v6 Internet comes from the fact that you are 
#trying to overlay a transit v6 service on top of a fundamentally non-transit 
#v4 infrastructure (transit in the Internet default-free zone sense).  It may be
#your only native v6 connectivity option, but you should be aware of the 
#limitations of that service (namely, what it is and what it is not).  

Of course, if the presumption is that sites should be multihomed for IPv6,
that implies a resolution of the IPv6 multihoming problem, a resolution
that I don't believe has happened yet unless you believe in the provider
independent allocation "solution" (which is inconsistent with IPv6's 
hierarchical route aggregation goals, etc.)

#Suggestions that Abilene increase its private peering with other transit 
#carriers is likely to fall on deaf ears, not because they lack the 
#understanding/funding/caring to build out a "tier-1" transit infrastructure, 
#but because its not what their network is intended or designed for.

Actually, Abilene has been extremely receptive to increasingly their IPv6
peering, and very responsive to particular suggestions, providing they have
infrastructure where they need it to make peering happen (and I say this
from first hand experience). 

#If you're interested in this sort of thing, you might have better luck speaking
#to the various gigapops directly 

<waves from the Oregon Gigapop> ;-)

#or to the members of the quilt project 
#(thequilt.net), which is where a some of the Internet2/Abilene gigapop 
#institutions are looking to leverage some of their local Internet2/Abilene 
#resources for commodity internet services.  Adding in native v6 peering into 
#the commodity v6 Internet at some of these gigapops might go a long way to
#resolving your problems.  (If someone is interested in this for the Boston, 
#MA/US area, drop me a private note).

A number of the providers who offer commodity IPv4 service through TheQuilt
also offer IPv6, but then we come back to the multihoming issue. 

Regards,

Joe