AndrewAlston
Group Head of IP Strategy – Liquid Telecommunicati
Ok,
So firstly, let me start off by saying that last night - I made a post in here that was a little off color, and probably a pretty stupid thing to do, as a joke, during a social function. If the original post offended anyone - I apologize - I won't attempt to justify it - it was stupid and lets call it a lesson in how to say really stupid things online and why you shouldn't do it.
That being said - when we go back to the original topic of the thread, and the real interesting discussion, we can actually take something away from this that I think WOULD be of interest to this community. So, lets talk for a second about the internet ecosystem between the ISPs.
Obviously, ISP's compete with each other on a daily basis - its a competitive market, and this is good, that level of competition between the ISP's drives innovation, it reduces costs, and its imperative to a thriving industry. At the same time ISP's because of the very nature of the Internet need to be able to work together technically - it has to be a collaborative environment - because without the interconnections and the peering and the relationships at a technical level - well, it just wouldn't function at all.
So - here is the thing - in an environment like we operate in, you can work together technically through a complex layer of paperwork, contracts, procedure and everything else. And well, that works for some players in the market - however, in many ways its a small minority of the market.
When we start talking about collaboration in terms of peering the game changes slightly - there, very often its the technical people who get together, discuss, talk, have a laugh, and in an environment of mutual respect for each other, out of the social game, are born peering relationships. The agreement that aside from the competition between the companies, the need to interconnect and exchange traffic is in the benefit of everyone concerned, from the users perspective carrying right along the chain.
While some very large players would love the market to believe that peering is a complex issue, that needs careful negotiations and contracts - what I'm saying here is, and this is where the real news is, it's simply not true in most cases. What generally happens is that either someone sends an email and says "Hi, I've arrived at this exchange, and I have a peering policy that says X, who is prepared to peer with me under that policy", or when its a get together of technical people, they stand up in a room and say "Hi, I'm from ...., and my peering policy says X, and if you'd like to peer with me, come and see me". Then, informal conversations are had, and suddenly BGP sessions are turned up. The net result, latency drops, reachability increases, and because traffic is now flowing direct over shared fabrics (the internet exchanges), costs drop - the traffic isn't going all the way to europe and back anymore.
I strongly believe as I said, that on a business front, ISP's *need* to compete, and they do, its pretty cutthroat. However, I also believe that the technical side needs to actually go beyond what I have explained above. The technical cooperation between the technical people for the mutual good of the internet is a critical topic that often doesn't get enough attention.
A few months ago actually, I was in Kenya, and a bunch of us got together and sat and had a conversation - the topic of the day was - where are the engineers of tomorrow - what changed and why are we not seeing the same rise of network engineering skill today that we did in the past. (In certain parts of the world, network engineers are becoming very hard to find, and there has, in the view of the people at that meeting, been a fundamental shift in how the engineers work, think and develop over the years).
The answer that came out of that - well, there were a few - but the one that hit me in particular - was that some how, over the years, the community that existed amongst the engineers some how got eroded and became less than what it once was. Back in the day when it was a pretty closed community, everyone from an engineering level knew everyone - there was a constant flow of ideas and communication and teaching each other as we all learnt as we went along. Somewhere along the line though - the teaching became formal, IRC and other mechanisms we used to communicate gave way to twitter and facebook, and the love of the field gave way to the love of money and the chasing of power and position. Obviously, this is a generalization - and segments of that close knit society still exist in various places and among various groups - but it DID change.
Basically, the social nature of the game changed - and I for one am a big advocate of potentially looking to find more ways to bring that back. There are actually certain players in this market who are doing an amazing job of it, one of whom actually sponsors an amazingly useful event that is specifically to bring ISP's together for a few beers every so often so their technical people can bond and establish the relationships necessary for successful peering. To that organization, you know who you are, Kudo's, you're doing fantastic work and its paying dividends in peering in this country that no one can deny.
So - In conclusion - while none of what I said really justifies the off color post originally, which really was a joke in a moment of stupidity, hopefully some good can come out of the moment, and I can share what I've said above - because it really is an interesting ecosystem and it also sheds light on how things can sometimes be beyond the money, and the fighting, and competition, and go back to basics - the relationships upon which the internet was built.
So firstly, let me start off by saying that last night - I made a post in here that was a little off color, and probably a pretty stupid thing to do, as a joke, during a social function. If the original post offended anyone - I apologize - I won't attempt to justify it - it was stupid and lets call it a lesson in how to say really stupid things online and why you shouldn't do it.
That being said - when we go back to the original topic of the thread, and the real interesting discussion, we can actually take something away from this that I think WOULD be of interest to this community. So, lets talk for a second about the internet ecosystem between the ISPs.
Obviously, ISP's compete with each other on a daily basis - its a competitive market, and this is good, that level of competition between the ISP's drives innovation, it reduces costs, and its imperative to a thriving industry. At the same time ISP's because of the very nature of the Internet need to be able to work together technically - it has to be a collaborative environment - because without the interconnections and the peering and the relationships at a technical level - well, it just wouldn't function at all.
So - here is the thing - in an environment like we operate in, you can work together technically through a complex layer of paperwork, contracts, procedure and everything else. And well, that works for some players in the market - however, in many ways its a small minority of the market.
When we start talking about collaboration in terms of peering the game changes slightly - there, very often its the technical people who get together, discuss, talk, have a laugh, and in an environment of mutual respect for each other, out of the social game, are born peering relationships. The agreement that aside from the competition between the companies, the need to interconnect and exchange traffic is in the benefit of everyone concerned, from the users perspective carrying right along the chain.
While some very large players would love the market to believe that peering is a complex issue, that needs careful negotiations and contracts - what I'm saying here is, and this is where the real news is, it's simply not true in most cases. What generally happens is that either someone sends an email and says "Hi, I've arrived at this exchange, and I have a peering policy that says X, who is prepared to peer with me under that policy", or when its a get together of technical people, they stand up in a room and say "Hi, I'm from ...., and my peering policy says X, and if you'd like to peer with me, come and see me". Then, informal conversations are had, and suddenly BGP sessions are turned up. The net result, latency drops, reachability increases, and because traffic is now flowing direct over shared fabrics (the internet exchanges), costs drop - the traffic isn't going all the way to europe and back anymore.
I strongly believe as I said, that on a business front, ISP's *need* to compete, and they do, its pretty cutthroat. However, I also believe that the technical side needs to actually go beyond what I have explained above. The technical cooperation between the technical people for the mutual good of the internet is a critical topic that often doesn't get enough attention.
A few months ago actually, I was in Kenya, and a bunch of us got together and sat and had a conversation - the topic of the day was - where are the engineers of tomorrow - what changed and why are we not seeing the same rise of network engineering skill today that we did in the past. (In certain parts of the world, network engineers are becoming very hard to find, and there has, in the view of the people at that meeting, been a fundamental shift in how the engineers work, think and develop over the years).
The answer that came out of that - well, there were a few - but the one that hit me in particular - was that some how, over the years, the community that existed amongst the engineers some how got eroded and became less than what it once was. Back in the day when it was a pretty closed community, everyone from an engineering level knew everyone - there was a constant flow of ideas and communication and teaching each other as we all learnt as we went along. Somewhere along the line though - the teaching became formal, IRC and other mechanisms we used to communicate gave way to twitter and facebook, and the love of the field gave way to the love of money and the chasing of power and position. Obviously, this is a generalization - and segments of that close knit society still exist in various places and among various groups - but it DID change.
Basically, the social nature of the game changed - and I for one am a big advocate of potentially looking to find more ways to bring that back. There are actually certain players in this market who are doing an amazing job of it, one of whom actually sponsors an amazingly useful event that is specifically to bring ISP's together for a few beers every so often so their technical people can bond and establish the relationships necessary for successful peering. To that organization, you know who you are, Kudo's, you're doing fantastic work and its paying dividends in peering in this country that no one can deny.
So - In conclusion - while none of what I said really justifies the off color post originally, which really was a joke in a moment of stupidity, hopefully some good can come out of the moment, and I can share what I've said above - because it really is an interesting ecosystem and it also sheds light on how things can sometimes be beyond the money, and the fighting, and competition, and go back to basics - the relationships upon which the internet was built.
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