Subject: [Ieprep] Re: Looking for governmental feedback as well

From: "Carl Ford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 10:31:25 -0600

Bill Woodcock wrote
>  I guess it would
> be more accurate to say that there's a relatively widespread understanding
> that these are desirable purchasing criteria, and that they guide the
> purchasing decisions of many of the larger and better-informed buyers of
> Internet services.  But they're not _majority_ practices, since the
> _majority_ of sites aren't multi-homed in the first place, only larger
> ones are.
> 
So the question that we have to ask for ieprep is do we have a goal of greater 
redundancy for the Internet overall, greater redundancy for the government sites 
specifically, or a specific practise on a government access methods.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Carl
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From: Bill Woodcock <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 17:43:35 -0800 (PST)

> specifically, or a specific practise on a government access methods.

Well, this is getting kind of reflexive...  Should the government require
the IETF to require the government to require itself to buy certain
services that it's not currently buying?  :-)  I'd say no, that's no place
for the IETF.

I guess the good news, from the point of view of anyone looking to dirve
increased redundancy at the unreliable edges, is that there's been that
general trend at work in the Internet already for the past two years.
It's been characterized as something of a downward spiral, since what
typically happens is a customer hears that their service might be
interrupted by an outage, and goes and buys some redundant service, but
their total budget for service hasn't really doubled, so they wind up
both buying a new service which is (on average) half as expensive as the
old one, and then replacing the old one with a different one that's half
as expensive.  The problem is, it's nearly twice as expensive for the two
new providers to deliver two bad services as for the old provider to
deliver one good one, so the industry winds up with less money to actually
solve problems and provide decent service.  TANSTAAFL.

                                -Bill

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From: Rex Buddenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 Dec 2002 09:53:02 -0800

> Any thoughts appreciated.

Carl,

The notion of 'government owned networks and sites' is of little and
decreasing value:
	- the most important reason is that in disaster relief type of
operations the real workers are at the county and local level and none
of those folks are their own ISPs.  
	- at the federal level, the trend is increasingly away from owning your
own plumbing.  Navy's NMCI contract outsourced both a bunch of
intra-Navy WAN plumbing and a fair amount of what had previously been
obtained from DISA.  
	- even in satellite comms networks, a great deal of intra-DOD traffic
is carried over commercial satellites.  For instance, in the Navy's ADNS
program, they simply wrote a Channel Access Protocol around INMARSAT B
plumbing so it accepts and spews IP datagrams at both ends.  

Sea story.  On 7 Dec 1941, when the last installment of the Purple
decrypt breaking off relations between Japan and US arrived, it was
promptly decrypted and walked up the chain of command in Washington
(before Ambassador Nomura arrived).  Stimson, Marshall, etc reacted by
understanding that this was indeed a war warning and dispatched alerts. 
The Army and Navy-owned circuits were congested so the warnings were
duplicated through commercial channels (e.g. Western Union).  
	In Hawaii, the alerts via the military channels seem to be unaccounted
for in the histories, but the commercial telegram spent the morning in
the messenger bag of the local (Nisei:) messenger while he was in a
ditch taking cover from the battle.  

The proper goal should be greater availability and survivability.  

The provisioning means is usable diverse alternate routes, and when
appropriate, duplicated end systems.  

The business means can be a variety:
	- some 'rules' imposed on the ISPs.  (This is much harder to do in the
unregulated ISP business than it is in the regulated PSTN one).
	- some carrots in the form of operating subsidies like we've done for
commercial shipbuilders and operators for years.  These carrots can be 
		o embedded in contracts for government-procured network services or 
		o they can be overt subsidies as offsets for the tragedy of the
commons.  Public good.

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From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 16:18:50 -0500

> of those folks are their own ISPs.

s/none/few/

A small number of US localities have their own fibre-based MANs.
A rather larger number of Swedish localities have their own MANs.
Situations vary from country to country, region to region, etc.

IETF needs to maintain a global perspective and avoid US-centrism.

> appropriate, duplicated end systems.

All those seem reasonable to me.

Ran