Is the Internet Shutting Out Independent Players?

ikekrull asks: "After looking to see how I could set up my company's LAN to be multi-homed ^? , I found that it would be next-to-impossible for me to do this. 'Providerless' IP addresses are no longer allocated to anybody in this part of the world (New Zealand) by APNIC ^? , unless you meet requirements (financial and political) that are pretty much unmeetable by anyone but a large ISP. Does this put control of the entire internet further and further into the hands of large corporate players, and and is anyone particularly interested in changing this situation?"

"ISPs aren't advertizing routes for competing ISPs, and since IP blocks are heavily filtered upstream, this won't do much good anyway. The reasons for this are clear (Routing table growth was getting way out of hand), hence the introduction of CIDR ^? , and the allocation of IPs to ISPs, with a resulting lockout on availability of routable IP space to individuals or smaller groups.

With the availabilty of IPv6, and the cost of RAM, I find it somewhat hard to believe that either IP address blocks are scarce, or that the size of routing tables are unmanageable any more. This might have been true with an 8MB Cisco 10 years ago, but surely it would be a negligible cost to put 1-2GB of RAM on even a reasonably budget router at todays prices.

Obviously, IPV6 isn't really here yet, but i would like to think that when (if) it arrives, we will see a more open routing system.

Is anybody working on returning some kind of equal standing to 'the little guys' when it comes to internet routing infrastructure, and how a more 'open' system could work in practice on tomorrow's (or today's) internet?"

You've got to pay to play

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a multi-homed network is extremely stressful on the rest of the Internet, and you're going to have to pay for the privilege.

Yes, routers have gotten a lot more advanced, but if every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to have their own APNIC-assigned IP block, it is going to cost a lot of money for the backbone providers and everybody else to accomodate the routing tables. Unless you're big enough to make a reasonably large dent in their bottom lines, they aren't going to care about making you happy because it's just too damn expensive. (And guess who would wind up paying for your pleasure? Every user of consumer-grade connections, that's who.)

You should be quite satisfied that you can even get high-speed connectivity (not to mention, connectivity from multiple providers at once) where you're at. Here in the USA, the most technologically advanced society in the world, it's difficult if not impossible to get *any* high speed service outside a major metropolitan area. Before my cable monopoly upgraded its network, I couldn't get any service at all that wasn't long distance dialup.

My advice to you: count your blessings, and find a different way to solve the problem.

Just my 2c.

~wally

Woah.

[SuiteSisterMary]

but surely it would be a negligible cost to put 1-2GB of RAM on even a reasonably budget router at todays prices.

Paper is cheap. I'm going to give you a list of 1 million names and phone numbers. Quick! Find Mr. Smith's phone number!

You've hit the nail on the head !

[alphaque]

It's the scarcity of IP addresses (then) and the growth of the routing tables which forced the situation we are in today. You're not alone in New Zealand suffering from it, most of us in Asia outside of Japan are too.

These methods and models of doling out IP addresses leave some of our internet data centres hopelessly inadequate at providing something as trivial as fault-tolerant links thru two or more ISPs within the same country as each ISP would refuse to route blocks belonging to other ISPs.

However, I dont think that arguing the increased RAM capacities of routers being capable of storing the huge routing tables is the answer.

CIDR and its ilk was developed to partly address huge routing tables, but the key point it addresses is propogation of new route changes which need to be sent to more routers and thus generating more traffic instead of being confined to just the edge (in context) routers as used now.

If the propogation of new and changed routes could be addressed without generating additional traffic, and believe me when I say bandwidth isnt cheap in Asia, then I would agree with utilizing larger RAM in routers to store these tables.

Incidentally, I was a couple of minutes short of FP. :)

Money, yes, but not what you're thinking

[itwerx]

Let's pretend you're APNIC. Now let's pretend you've got 100 million geeks clamoring for IP's. How much of your resources do you spend on customer-service and hand-holding before you throw up your hands in despair and start setting some limits?
Perzackly.
Now, consider the fact the Joe and Jane Geek have to have a connection to use those nice shiny new IP addresses. And you soon see why we have the present hierarchy of telco's and ISP's.

Does anyone find this surprising?

[Xenopax]

Not be to be blunt or anything, but hasn't it occured to you that eventually we will end up with a few major ISPs? We watched for years as small ISPs struggled and went out of business, while the large players sucked up the business.

Nope, I sure as hell not suprised we're going down this road. All this new policy will do is speed up the natural selection of companies until a few monster ISPs (probably run by an existing monster like AOL/Time Warner/Nullsoft) run everything.

Unfortunate futures...

[Cutriss]

Unfortunately, the very reasons you're eagerly awaiting IPv6 are probably the reasons that you won't ever see it, and you probably already know those reasons.

The Internet stopped being about information about five years ago (Or at least that wasn't the point anymore) and it's now all about eCommerce and BS like that. The very same companies that got on the Internet in the first place to deliver information are now delivering information only from their marketing departments, and not from engineers or researchers. Commerical interests have all but drowned out its original spirit, and are also partially the reason for the inception of Abilene (Internet2). Of course, it probably won't be long before that new promised land gets pillaged and raped. The Internet as we know it seems to be in an eternal state of loss of innocence, I'm afraid. I don't think the solution is to supplant or supercede the original 'net, but to just have a user-maintained network...kinda like what the network-area neighborhoods are designed to accomplish, except on a much grander scale. When the corporate interests don't exist, then the public can do with it as they see fit.

Somebody tried selling me on a box that did that

[swb]

Someone tried selling me on a box that did that, except it would take several high speed connections (like 4 or 8 ethernet ports on the box, you supply the other end) and then via NAT and then intelligently load balance the traffic across those connections. I think it had the ability to transparently redirect traffic based on protocol to these presumably cheap broadband connections.

The idea was that instead of buying another expensive T1 because everyone's reloading Slashdot all the time, you buy cheapie DSL connectivity as needed and run your "unimportant" traffic out this box and the business-critical gets more of the T1.

It's a neat idea.

searches are expensive

[Agthorr]

Sure, you can STORE lots of routes in that much RAM, but how are you going to search that many routes to find the *right* one, in real-time, to route millions (or billions) of packets per second?

Cheap RAM?

[Sandman1971]

"But surely it would be a negligible cost to put 1-2GB of RAM on even a reasonably budget router at todays prices." This person is definately showing they have no clue what they're talking about. YOu can't just put cheap 100$ 512 SDRAM.... or there goes your Cisco warranty. 1 gig of CIsco RAM will cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most routers that can handle that much RAM are not 'reasonably priced', unless you consider hundreds of thousands reasonable (IE: 7500 with RSP8 card). It's a shame that ISPs and NAPs in New Zealand don't offer BGP advertisements for multihoming. I work for a NAP in North America, and advertising another provider's classes for multihoming purposes is not something unusual; it's common practice.

Why go multihomed?

[Colin]

I'm not sure why you want to go multihomed, with all the attendant problems that it brings. If this is a corporate connection, that's not got services (other than mail) being provided to the outside world, then I don't really see the point. I think you can provide the redundancy in other ways - here are some ideas, using 2 ISPs (and PA IP addresses allocated by each of them).

Put a mail server on each connection (or map an IP address from each connection through your firewall to the mail server). MX records will do your load balancing and redundancy for you.

Use NAT/PAT for users to connect to the Internet. If one conenction goes down, remove the internal routing to that connection - all your sessions will now go out of the other connection. I find that this is quicker than waiting for BGP to reroute connections via a backup/alternate path. It also gives you more flexibility in internal network numbering, and to move ISPs.

Host services with colocation providers - not internally. Colo service providers have already solved most of the service provision problems, and are well connected to the Internet - I don't think it's worth trying to do this in house.

Why do you have to 'own' the IPs?

[Phizzy]

How many computers do you have on this lan? Why do you think you need to 'own' the IP addresses? First off, you don't even need to own ANY ip addressed to do multihoming. You could NAT all of you LAN boxes up into the single /30 advertisement that your ISP(s) are going to give you for the serial interface on your router, and then have the ISP advertise that out to the 'net, and voila, you have multihoming. When one provider goes down, you can use your IGP to route across the other, OR, if you wanted to go a litte more high-class, you could buy a large router, and take full BGP tables from both providers, and differentiate intelligently based on the preferences sent on the routes. Now, if you don't want to do NAT, and there are a whole slew of good reasons you wouldn't, why are you hung up on ownership of these IP addresses? Why won't you let the IP-allocation process work like it's supposed to? If APNIC had to allocate IPs to every small business in the region it's responsible for, it would take 3 years to get IPs from them. Buy a block of IPs from your ISP(s), and if you transition to another ISP, re-number your network. Or, if you don't wanna go the cheap way, you CAN buy portable IP space from providers. Many of them buy whole Class As just for this purpose, it's just that you're going to have to pay more for these IPs than you would otherwise, as you should, since the ISP's netblocks can become non-contiguous if you leave. As far as your questions about IPv6 and router memory, the internet routing table is well up above 100k routes already, and there are many routers out there that are already having problems dealing with tables of this size. Many Cisco boxes will die in the near future if not upgraded, as their old routing engines run out of memory, and despite the fact that PC memory is cheap, router memory often is not. Especially when you have to install it on the tens of thousands of routers any decently sized ISP will have. IPv6 isn't really even a factor yet.. and when it is, many routers are going to need heavy upgrading (software, hardware, etc) to deal with it, which is why so many ISPs aren't rushing out to do it. So buy some portable IP space, get yourself multihomed, and go buy a good BGP book.

//Phizzy

Incorrect assumptions, answers

[uslinux.net]

First of all, RAM on a router is not the issue anymore. The issue is bandwidth. If your router has to maintain 100,000,000 routers instead of 100,000, you have a 1,000 fold increase in routing table updates in network bandwidth.

Second, IPv6 will solve this, at least for a while. Despite IPv6 having enough addresses for all the particles in the universe, I'm sure we'll run out again in a few years :-)

Finally, how many companies actually need their own IPs? Small ISPs just get their IP range from a larger player, who is providing them with bandwidth. Under normal circumstances, a mom & pop ISP doesn't need an OC-192 - they're probably happy with a T-3. It's cheaper for them to sublet a fraction of a big player's bandwidth then to go at it alone.

Re:You can buy multi-homed connections.

[Brainless]

The company I work for has IP's assigned from a few of the major US networks (CW, UUNet, etc) and we have BGP4 to allow any of the IP's assigned to us to use any of our backbones. This can cause problems with peering of backbone providers and has caused a few headaches here.

CW recently changed their structure so you can tell them how to advertise your networks to their peers. This resolves most of the problems we have had with multi-homing.

Keep in mind we are a fairly small network with under 100 routing/switching devices on our network. So to say it can not be done means it is time to hire a new network admin.

Large players *do* and *must* run the internet

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Does this put control of the entire internet further and further into the hands of large corporate players, and and is anyone particularly interested in changing this situation?

Not really, and no I'm not.

The Internet already is, always has been, and must be, run by large players. You cannot have an interconnecting network that spans the world and has that many users without someone very big to put the infrastructure (hardware and software) in place, and to maintain it afterwards. The only people capable of doing that are major corporations, and a few very large not-so-commercial bodies (the academic community, for example).

I'm sorry, but if keeping things efficient and practical for these essential big players means you can't play with precious IP address space, then that's the price you're going to have to pay. There just isn't space for everyone to play with their own blocks of IPs any more, and there isn't time for everyone further up the chain to account for them even if the space was there.

Yes, it's unfortunate that some of these big players have a monopoly, which is rarely a good thing. Yes, it's unfortunate that little fish get eaten by big fish. But unless you have a better suggestion, there are only two choices: (a) leave the big fish alone, accept that for now there will be issues, and have an Internet, or (b) get on your high horse about monopoly abuse, civil liberties, and any other subject of pontification you can find, and kill the Internet. Me, I think that's a pretty easy choice.

Re:You've got to pay to play

[TelcontarX]

*LoL* the USA is the most technologically advanced society in the world?? USA is so far back on lots of areas they hardly qualify as a technological society at all. Sure there are lots of high-tech stuff going on at NASA, Pentagon, MIT, etc. but the SOCIETY is very low tech. In Norway about 80% of all youth aged 16-25 had their own cellphone in 1999. Can you find statistics showing the same numbers for the US ? In Norway you can also get high-speed internet connections almost everywhere, including very rural areas, but of course with a larger choice of services in the urban areas. Statistics from http://www.ssb.no/samfunnsspeilet/utg/200006/Fig6- 5.shtml

Re:You've got to pay to play

[skelley]

"Here in the USA, the most technologically advanced society in the world".

I think you mean Finland.

Re:You've got to pay to play

[Golias]

Are you aware of that the north/south length of Norway is the same as the distance from the north of Denmark to the south of Italy?

And yet it's still to small to park Ameica's cars on it.

The reason why most American's don't have cell phones is not lack of availability. We have dozens of digital network providers fighting for the chance to put a shiny new motorolla in our hands. It's because our land lines are so fantastically cheap to use (per minute charges: zero) that nobody wants to bother with the cost of a mobile phone unless they absolutely, positively need it... and most people don't.

Re:You've got to pay to play

[operagost]

USA is so far back on lots of areas they hardly qualify as a technological society at all.

I'm not sure how you got a +1 instead of a -1 Troll for this one. I mean really, you can't estimate the technological status of a country based on its broadband and wireless penetration. First off, most teenagers have had pagers here since the early 90's. With the quantity of payphones available, pagers were and are very useful. The penetration of wireless phones is still fairly low here because of the size of the country (much bigger than yours, with many areas of low population density) and because we actually picked up on wireless a little TOO EARLY. We're stuck with a huge analog base, and a half dozen incompatible digital systems. We don't have a heavily socialist government like yours where we can force corportations to settle on one standard. This brings me to broadband: yeah, same problems. The US government doesn't own the phone systems, and doesn't heavily regulate them, so they are dragging their feet as much as possible. The aforementioned low population density causes problems as well. A bad thing? Only if you prefer spending more time in cyberspace than meatspace.

Re:You've got to pay to play

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your American Nationalism and shove it. Nearly all the world's news comes from the US? Sure, but only because we're constantly laughing at your ridiculous politicians, and weeping at your stupid greed, your vanity, and your curious habit of murdering children in the third world. Nearly all the world's content? Bullshit. It may amaze you to learn that there are people making movies outside Hollywood, and that they're better at it. It may amaze you to learn that there are actually countries in the world that don't speak English. You probably weren't taught such things at your "schools".

Unequalled universitys? Hardly. Heard of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial? They're older than your fucking country, and easily the equal of your universities - particularly considering that English universities are state-funded, instead of charging ludicrous fees.

All the US has given us is nuclear bombs. Switzerland gave you the Web. Japan gave you economical cars and cheap microprocessors. Linux is a European innovation.

I'm not surprised you posted as AC. Even you must know that your post is nonsense. I pity you.

Re:You've got to pay to play

[Trifthen]

Also, local calls are free.

Ahahaahahahah! Evidently you've never lived in Illinois, or known anyone who has ever done so in their entire lives. Illinois has a surprisingly backwards mishmash of private networks that each need a small fee to provide use of their lines. Due to this, every call you make, local or not, costs $0.05 at the bare minimum.

Even Iowa has a better phone system. How sad is that? Illinois also doesn't recycle or use Ethenol in their gasoline. That's just one example of how even a single state of the US can vastly differ from the rest. I won't even touch city government with a 100 meter poll. Each state is almost its own country loosely associated with a larger federal control for the sake of simplicity and cooperation between states. But just from one side of the Mississippi to the other, even if you only move three miles from Iowa to Illinois, and Sweet Baby Jesus the red tape that is required to complete said move is insane.

Insurance up $400 a year. State taxes down $600 a year. New drivers license, new registration, vastly different system handling both. Etc, etc, etc. All because I moved three freaking miles!

There are very few things you can say that actually apply the the US as a whole. The shitty antiquated adherance to state-based system ensures that. We're essentially a bunch of separate countries that believe in the Constitution and Bill of Rights with a few federal mandates thrown in for good measure. Aside from that, lots of federal level things are overridden, very few things are similar, and every state has a bunch of different old laws that no longer apply to current society.

Now, take a company, or a bunch of companies, that instead of spreading across one state (European country) tries to spread across multiple states with the goal of covering the entire God Damn continent (Europe.) The guy is right about us, but for the wrong reasons. There very well may be specific states that smack Holland around, but as a whole, we aren't really all that far from Europe as a whole. Except for one thing. Since they actually are separate countries, they have better concentration on desired goals than any of our individual states could muster. If the US wanted to do that, they have to first push it past the various branches of government and push it down to all the individual states as well. With things that can't be federally mandated, that's almost a pipe-dream. We're a slug. But we're a big slug on a skate-board. We'll get there... eventually.

Besides, it doesn't matter anyway. Japan kicks the rest of the world's ass as far as technology is concerned. Their country is about the size of California. They're nimble, small, and able to kick our sorry asses in almost every facet of innovation. They scrapped an entire cell-phone system in three years in favor of something better. We'd never put up with that here. Even their corporations change business focus before resorting to layoffs. (Note the company that changed from producing ice-breaking ships to indoor skiing and beaches using the technology they already had for making ice and creating waves.) Here, we slog around, and fire as many people as humanly possible as slaves to the stock market.

All I have to say is that the type of overhead you're dealing with (government, business, land size, etc.) can vastly affect the speed of saturation of new technologies. Countries with a focus like Japan or Holland will slap us around like you wouldn't believe because they just have an insanely smaller amount of uncooperative roadblocks along the way.

But you already said that. No compelling need. We're so individualistic, no part of the country has the kind of focus necessary for much forward movement. We seem to like lateral development better. We're a jack of all trades, master of none. That's probably how it will always be. There's nothing wrong with that, but it also means all of these smaller countries will kick our ass on something for a while before we get around to doing it too.

Live with it. ^_^

Multihoming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a dumb solution to the problem of redundancy. The purpose is to allow communication between two points even if one of two routes fail. The multihoming solution says that you give the endpoints each a single address, and let all the routers figure everything out on the fly. Seems a lot smarter to just have two sets of IP addresses, and negotiate which IP address to use at the connection startup (possibly through round robin DNS). Sure, you might drop a connection and have to bring it back up again, but this can easily be handled by the app layer.

ipv6 won't help multihoming

[cotu]

Multihoming will cause BGP route advertisements to go
exponential, and it's an exponential growth that Moore's
law cannot keep up with. This is very worrisome. The
reason is because multihoming breaks heirarchical
addressing assumptions, especially the assumptions that
the last round of CIDR bandaids made. I don't know why
people keep bringing up IPv6. Its design wasn't intended
to deal with route table growth, and while some people
think it may be somewhat helpful since it will start with
CIDR from the get-go, it still expects a heirarchical
provider address space.

This is very old news though, and the source of lots of
flamage on the v6-haters list, including a lot of people
who think the IESG completely fucked up by solving
the wrong problem (address depletion vs. route explosion).

Re:You've got to pay to play

[TelcontarX]

Unfortunalty yes you comprise the greatest portion, and even more unfortunatly you make most of the News... one sided coverage have never been a good thing. Truth always looses.

And no your universities are not the best. They are top class, but so are many universities in Europe as well.

Highspeed access is availible through most of the western world. Again not just the US.

The US society have given more because they are so large. Per person they have not given much at all. Add everything Europe have given, and you can compare on a real scale. Saying an eagle is better to fly than a sparrow because it produces more feathers is not a valid comparison I think you'll agree.

And no I'm not anti america. I'm just anti ignorant americans thinking they are the best no matter what, because I know its not the truth. (neither are we for that sake)