abilene -> he.net routing humor

[Eric Gauthier]

Heya,

> Maybe Hurricane and Abilene could simply peer? :)
>
> Abilene would be a great travelagency btw, though show you the real
> touristic route :)

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.

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).  
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.

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

Eric :)