[52204] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Cogent service
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William B. Norton)
Fri Sep 20 12:51:24 2002
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 09:54:39 -0700
To: David Diaz <davediaz@smoton.net>,
Ralph Doncaster <ralph@istop.com>,
"nanog@merit.edu" <nanog@merit.edu>
From: "William B. Norton" <wbn@equinix.com>
Cc: <ml@vayner.net>
In-Reply-To: <p05111a03b9b0dd7b88a5@[65.191.183.11]>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 10:31 AM 9/20/2002 -0400, David Diaz wrote:
> The only negative routing comments Ive heard are complaints about extra
> hop counts.
Dave - I know you know this and you are referring to an issue that both of
us have heard....
The hidden assumption here is that the extra hops implies worse
performance. This is perception rather than real. One could quite easily
put in place a VPN or MPLS substrate and make all destinations appear "one
hop away" without changing the underlying technology or performance of the
network.
A network application with clear latency/jitter/packet loss characteristics
would be a more effective way to evaluate network fitness. I suspect what
really happens is
a) the is a performance problem somewhere in the path
b) a traceroute is done
c) the traceroute is misinterpreted - "the problem is packets go all over
the place!"
d) the misinterpretation is generalized to "more hops is bad"
from what I've seen anyway.
Bill
