Subject: 100th Issue of The COOK Report on Internet (September 2000)

From: Gordon Cook <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 17:02:32 -0400

Caimis Launched as CAIDA Commercial Spin Off
Goal Is to Give Internet Industry its First Production Quality 
Network Management, Traffic Analysis and Location Sensitive 
Measurement Tools				pp. 1 - 8,

We interview Tracie Monk, Kim Claffy (kc), David Moore, and Daniel 
McRobb on the details of CAIDA's creation of Caimis.  Caimis 
www.caimis.com is a profit making spin off from CAIDA that will take 
many of CAIDA's research oriented, network traffic management tools 
and upgrade them to production quality commercial software for use by 
major ISPs.  Kc explains the CAIDA Internet Teaching Laboratory 
program, the san Diego Nap and plans for OC48 mon - as well as 
CAIDA's work on defining and understanding the Internet core.

The Caimis web site went live on July 12.  This interview is the 
first detailed description of Caimis to be published.  Caimis will 
focus on monitoring systems, network management systems and 
geographic location systems. In the monitoring area it will offer a 
variety of solutions that are for passive and active monitoring 
through active polling and passive analysis of router and link data. 
Its network management systems will be used for acquiring, storing, 
correlating, and analyzing data. The third area, geographic 
localization services, involves a set of solutions aimed at mapping 
different types of network data to geographic locations. It is the 
latter area that has direct relevance for e-commerce and financial 
transactions.

In June Caimis formed an affiliate company, Caimis Geo, Inc., to 
develop the geographic location services business. These will be 
tools aimed more towards content providers or e-commerce websites, 
where they want to know where their customers are actually located - 
perhaps because they have restrictions on distribution of software to 
people in different regions, restrictions that are geographically 
based or by country.  Or, you might have web sites that might want to 
change the language presented on their homepage depending on which 
country the user is coming from or return targeted content based on 
where the user lives, e.g., content appropriate to Southern 
California versus Boston.

Caimis finds that ISP service level agreements generally still do not 
measure up to the standards that business to business customers 
expect to see. Hewlett Packard, Cabletron and Seagate produce network 
management systems but do so without an adequate understanding of the 
Internet problem domain. While current solutions can tell network 
engineers what's going on with a particular router, when that ISP needs 
to move up to something like defining an end-to-end service for a 
particular customer, there is a big void. Providing such solutions 
are challenges that happen both within and between providers.

When you start talking about inter-providers, the situation gets 
worse. Information can't be exchanged. Providers don't want to 
provide any sort of service level guarantees for infrastructure that 
they don't control and to which they have no access. Among the things 
that need to be done are the creation of some sort of common 
interfaces that providers can use within their own network, but 
between different systems.  For example provisioning and network 
management itself, and element management. Today, basically most of 
the network management systems sit in the element level, meaning they 
tell you what's going on with particular devices in the network. They 
don't interface well with any of the other business processes within 
a provider.  These are the customer care processes, billing, 
provisioning, ordering, trouble-ticketing, which is a big problem in 
providing service to the business-to-business environment. Ironically 
in this respect the ILECs have better systems than the Internet 
industry.  Caimis intends to solve that shortcoming.

Caimis has two offices. The San Diego headquarters is focusing on the 
development of the geographic-locations services under Caimis Geo, 
Inc.  The San Diego headquarters will also be doing all of the 
productization, sales and distribution of all of Caimis monitors and 
network management systems. The Ann Arbor office will be the leading 
edge site for senior software and network engineers who are doing 
customized network management solutions. They will be the ones 
staying on the cutting edge technology-wise and requirement-wise for 
the large providers. San Diego will take some of these solutions and 
develop standardized products that can then be distributed and made 
available for the smaller ISPs, enterprises, and others.

Cogent  Communications  Guarantees 100 Mbs Internet for $1000 per 
Month Buys Dark Fiber and Builds National Network Optimized Entirely for 
Data - Business Model Emphasizes 100 BaseT LAN Interconnection in 
Buildings it Serves			pp. 9 - 14

We interview Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent which n July 17th 
announced $90 million dollars in second round venture capital 
fnding..  Cogent is the first national ISP to be formed with the 
business model made possible by the new combination of SONET free 
fiber, gigabit Ethernet and dense wave division multiplexing.  This 
technology permits IP data networks to be built for  only one one -
hundredth of the cost of their voice equivalents less than 10 years 
ago.  It will use a two hundred million dollar 30 year IRU on a pair 
of fibers from the Williams  Communications Network and  fiber from 
Metromedia to connect  office buildings in twenty cities nationwide.  
It will offer tenants of these buildings 100 megabit per second 
internet connectivity for $1000 per month. Cogent has signed 
commitments to spend more than $600 million on its build out. Without  
SONET  equipment Cogent is protecting its network at layer 3.  It 
describes itself as a facilities-based nationwide switched LAN.

Gigabit Ethernet is used in their local loop.  SONET framing in long 
haul.  The SONET framing is a transport standard that is built into 
the Cisco routers.  Consequently there is no additional cost.  In the 
event of a fiber cut instead of 50 milli-second SONET based recovery, 
they  get one second recovery at the router level which, for data, is 
adequate. Any physical disruption in service would cause the core 
routers to start rerouting packets.  This process takes about one 
second.  Cogent promises to give its customers a full 100 megabits of 
band width pledging not to put more than 96 on a OC192 -  or 9.6 
gigabit - loop  of 1500 miles in length.

Schaeffer explains how Cogent selected its fiber providers.  He notes 
that: "There are some vendors whose equipment will only work with 
certain physical shelter spacing.  As we evaluated our potential dark 
fiber vendor, we looked for that network vendor whose shelter spacing 
would support the maximum number of equipment vendors. Note that the 
shelter spacings are not inter connect points.  They are there only 
to amplify the signal.  All that we need to be able to do is to rent 
standard size rack space in the shelters."  He points out that "fiber 
can be optimized for the number of wave lengths, for distance or for 
the power applied to it.  There are a number of different design 
criteria and each vendor takes a slightly different approach to which 
of those criteria they emphasize with their fiber."

Schaeffer developed a matrix for the evaluation and selection of both 
his long distance and metropolitan area software.  He discusses in 
detail how Cogent arrived at the decisions for selecting and 
integrating both sets of equipment.  Cogent's Network will open in 
New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago in October.

GAO Report Shatters ICANN Founding Myths:  Neither Privatizaton Nor 
Power Sharing 	--	Policy Control Over Operation and Content of 
the "Authoritative" Root - ICANN's Single Biggest Prize - Remains 
with US Government			pp. 15 - 21

We describe how ICANN marches onward to the chant of its own version 
of reality.  The GAO report released in July 7 found ICANN's creation 
to have been legal but it could not find any support for the idea 
that the Department of Commerce had the right to manage the root.  It 
concluded that it was also very doubtful that the DoC had the legal 
right to give control of the root to ICANN saying that it did not 
look exhaustively at this point because the DoC told it that it had 
no intention of doing so anyway.  In Yokohama only a few days later 
Beckwith Burr proceeded to muddy the waters by stating that she was 
prepared to give ICANN operational but not policy control of the 
root.  An ominous development considering ICANN's statement that it 
was ready to demand that the root sever operators sign contracts with 
it.

After having caved in rather than face discovery on its first 
lawsuit, at Yokohama the ICANN Board proceeded quite skillfully to 
disarm its next, potentially more serious, opponent IO Design.  
Having given the impression that it might rule on who would get in 
the root, it collected a number of TLD applicants on its web site, 
lied that it had consensus for only a very small number of new top 
level domains, (between 1 and 3) set up a $50,000 application fee and 
then announced that it would receive applications August 1 and 
announce the winners on October 1.  In one swift move it deprived IO 
design of both due process and anti-trust grounds for suing it.  It 
will choose on October first .eu and a gTLD that will have no 
negative baggage for its trademark rulers.  Dot web will not be in 
the running.

The Board also showed its continuing fear of letting in any outside 
influence that might expose its operations to public view.  For the 
ninth time in less than two years ICANN changed its by-laws.  To 
ensure continued control by the original Dyson, Roberts, Touton 
cabal, it extended once again the terms of four of the original 
directors through the annual meeting in November 2002.  It decided to 
study the question of whether it should even have an at large 
membership.  In its efforts to make certain that no one outside the 
original cabal would ever have a voice it entered the following 
paragraph into its by laws: "The Corporation shall not have members 
as defined in the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law 
("CNPBCL"), notwithstanding the use of the term "Member" in these 
bylaws, in a selection plan adopted by Board resolution, or in any 
other action of the Board. Instead, the Corporation shall allow 
individuals (described in these bylaws as "Members") to participate 
in the activities of the Corporation as described in this Article II 
and in a selection plan adopted by Board resolution, and only to the 
extent set forth in this Article II and in a selection plan adopted 
by particular router, when that ISP needs to move up to something like 
defining an end-to-end service for a particular customer, there is a 
big void. Providing such solutions are challenges that happen both 
within and between Board resolution."
 
Optical BGP Proposed as Means of Wide Area Interconnection of 
Bandwidth-Rich Edges Without Burdening Largest Backbones With 
Additional Traffic Created by Gigabit Ethernet and Dark Fiber Driven 
Local Bandwidth Explosion	 		pp. 22-24

"OBGP is a proposed extension to BGP for the manipulation of optical  
cross connects to permit them to be automatically setup and 
configured as BGP speaking devices to support multiple direct optical 
lightpaths between  many different autonomous domains. OBGP may also 
allow customers at the edge to control a subset of lightpaths within 
another network's wavelength cloud so that they can manage their own 
light path routing within that cloud."  . .  .  . [We suggest 
treating] 'each optical cross connect as an independent virtual BGP 
router with only one input port and one output port.  A virtual BGP 
router can then be set up for each optical cross connect and separate 
BGP sessions initiated with its peers."  .   .  .  .  "The physical 
characteristics of a lightpath give it an intrinsic capability of 
being a "poor man's" logical switched path with a predefined Quality 
of Service. " .  .  .  .  "The exchange of lightpaths may also allow 
for a simpler mechanism to allow for settlement in peering and 
transit between ISPs."  .  .  .   . "In future there may even be 
wavelength commodity markets where ISPs can trade wavelengths and 
adjacencies on the open market."

-- 
****************************************************************
The COOK Report on Internet      Index to 8 years of the COOK  Report
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From: Betsy Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 20:37:49 -0400

> Gordon Cook wrote:

Just wondering - does anyone know why this was sent to us?
BLB

---

From: "Michael Reilly <Michael Reilly" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 18:23:22 -0700 (PDT)

>>Just wondering - does anyone know why this was sent to us?

SPAM

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 09:24:35 -0400

> >>Just wondering - does anyone know why this was sent to us?

Umm.. to be correct, the proper term is probably "spewage".   True SPAM
is either the brand name for an alledgedly-edible canned meat product, or
mail sent with little or no regard for whether the recipient is interested.

For all of Gordon's faults, I think he was convinced that the IETF membership
was at least tangentially interested.. 4 news items, one each on network
management tools, network infrastructure, ICANN, and BGP.  Last I heard,
the IETF was at least slightly concerned with what ICANN was doing, although
the NANOG people are probably more interested in the Cogent Comm and BGP
articles.

Certainly more on topic than advertisement for HP printer supplies, anyhow ;)

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech