[165013] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: How big is the Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo Bicknell)
Thu Aug 15 16:11:14 2013
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
In-Reply-To: <E61EDCA2-B008-444C-9123-6159FBEC8BCD@ianai.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 15:10:31 -0500
To: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> =
wrote:
> My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite =
being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to =
my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" =
traffic by your definition.
>=20
> I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model =
most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm =
confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, =
that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic.
Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and =
let's put them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but =
at a coffee shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent =
and our two machines exchange data.
That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over =
the network? They just happen to be on the same LAN.
My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary =
definition is more useful in some way, but for my arbitrary definition =
you've applied the rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way =
to think about things. In a broad english sense "IP packets traversing =
an Internet connected network are Internet traffic".
It's all graph cross sections. "Peering" volume totals a set of =
particular links in the graph, omitting traffic from your laptop to your =
file server, or your NAS to your laptop. My model attempts to isolate =
every edge on the graph, and generate the total sum of IP traffic =
crossing any Internet connected network, which would always include all =
forms of local caches (Akamai, Google, Netflix) and even your NAT. I =
think that's a more interesting number, and a number that's easier to =
count and defend than say a peering or "backbone" number.
--=20
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
