[ga-full] [Enredo] announce: Hubs + Spokes (fwd)

[Joe Baptista <baptista@pccf.net>]

This is an interesting article on internet infrastructure.  Worth the
read.

Regards
Joe Baptista

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2000 20:33:05 -0400
From: Bram Dov Abramson <babramson@telegeography.com>
Reply-To: enredo@reacciun.ve
To: enredo@reacciun.ve
Subject: [Enredo] announce: Hubs + Spokes

[publication announcement]

HUBS AND SPOKES: A TeleGeography Internet Reader
<http://www.telegeography.com/Publications/hs00.html>

What does the Internet look like?  Most engineers draw it as a cloud.  That
shouldn't surprise anyone: in a sense, there is no Internet, only
networking standards like TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP
(Internet Protocol) which allow an ever-increasing number of private data
networks across the world to exchange digital information.  These networks
and the traffic they carry give the Internet its form.  That they
interconnect gives the Internet its substance.

But if you look inside the Internet cloud, a fairly distinct hub-and-spoke
structure begins to emerge at both an operational (networking) and physical
(geopolitical) level.  A well-known Internet graph created at Lucent
Technologies by Bill Cheswick and Hal Burch, for example, is built up from
thousands and thousands of nodes (routers) and edges (links between
routers), each reflecting a possible path from Cheswick and Burch's home
network to the rest of the Internet.  Even a casual review of these hubs
and spokes can provide a rough idea of the Internet's scale and some of its
major constituents (http://www.peacockmaps.com).

What about the geopolitical dimensions of this hub-and-spoke model?
Traditionally, the Internet's basic transmission facilities have been
centered around the U.S., the hub whose backbone spokes connected the rest
of the world.  Some spokes were quite thick, like those linking the U.K.,
Canada and Japan.  Others were pencil thin: Russia's and Brazil's, for
example.  This was no conspiracy.  The topology, largely unplanned,
reflected the Internet's U.S. origin; its embryonic commercial structure,
including America's head start in building network backbones; its status as
home to most Internet content; and waning monopoly pricing of cross-border
data links outside the U.S.

By 1999, this U.S.-centric structure had slowly begun to shift. Today more
bandwidth links key European cities to each other than to the U.S., making
western Europe the first hub to emerge from North America's shadow.
Intra-regional links between Asian networks are also growing.  As a result,
the Internet's global hub-and-spoke structure has begun to diffuse,
replicating itself within regions. In Europe, for example, single cities
have begun to play the role that the U.S. once did worldwide.

Yet country-by-country numbers tell only part of the story.  More detailed
data for metropolitan areas suggest that the emerging structure of the
Internet's hub-and-spoke structure is based upon a core of meshed
connectivity between world cities on coastal shores -- Silicon Valley, New
York, and Washington, DC; London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt; Tokyo
and Seoul.

The Internet's architecture is still evolving.  *Hubs and Spokes*, the
first publication from TeleGeography's Internet program, expands and
updates our past material to help readers understand that evolution.  Like
our PSTN (public switched telephone network) research, our Internet work
focuses on international industry structure, network topology, and traffic
flow.

As the Internet takes its place at the core of an emerging public network,
hard questions are coming up.  What shape is that network taking on -- and
will those who operate it be organized horizontally, by function, or
vertically, by end-to-end slice?  How will those players interoperate, both
technically and financially, to ensure that the hubs and spokes continue to
connect?  Who will govern the cloud, and what are the demand drivers
causing it to expand?

PRIMER

Architecture:  How is the global Internet structured?  Not long ago, the
answer seemed easy: the Internet was U.S.-centric.  As regional hubbing
makes geographical diversity a more pervasive network feature, Net
architecture moves beyond its U.S.-domestic and
global-but-still-U.S.-centric phases toward a third stage characterized by
a distributed global presence.  That is the theory, anyway.  But a
combination of regulatory and economic factors have threatened to forestall
the end of the U.S.-centric phase.  Where do things stand?  And where are
they headed?

Finance:  Who pays for the Internet?  The answer is complicated: a typical
Internet transmission may involve many different networks -- five, say, or
fifteen -- and is broken up into many different packets, which may take
radically different paths to get from point a to point b.  That makes it
hard to bill Internet communications in the way that traditional phone
communications are billed.  How do peering and transit models for traffic
exchange fit in -- and what happens in practice?

Governance: Who governs the Internet?  Most Netizens would once have
scoffed at the question, and probably sent unfriendly e-mails to the person
posing it.  But dramatic growth has transformed the Internet into both a
quasi-public global infrastructure and a very big business.  In doing so,
its priorities have shifted toward stability and predictability.  That's
where governance comes in.  What's up with ICANN?  And how did we get there?

Demand: Demand growth for IP capacity is almost impossible to state:
because IP applications tend to grab the bandwidth they need -- slowing
down rather than halting when less is available -- and because faster
performance impacts user behavior directly, new capacity is filled readily,
and the challenge for many backbone providers is simply to build as fast as
possible.  Keeping this challenge in mind, we look to the network's edges
and why they're being populated by an increasing number of users; the
on-ramps that let them get data to and from the core; and the content,
devices, and interactive applications which are helping increase the
volumes involved.

Voice: One of the Internet's most-discussed demand drivers is voice
telephony.  During the last year, voice-over-IP (VoIP) players have
attracted very large amounts of new capital, and the trend toward telco
investments in VoIP carriers could well accelerate the long-awaited
convergence between the telco and IP worlds.  How does VoIP work?  And
where does it stand?

INTERNATIONAL INTERNET BANDWIDTH

Providers: A market overview and comprehensive list of more than 250
international Internet service providers (IISPs) headquartered in 85
countries provides a guide -- and direct coordinates -- for the online maps
and data which will help readers size up the players.

Connectivity and Exchanges: How much international Internet bandwidth goes
where?  A guide to international city-to-city bandwidth provides a
geographical summary of the global Internet, along with a table of the top
50 international Internet hub cities worldwide.  Maps help present the
information visually, showing international backbone routes for the Europe,
Asia/Pacific, and Americas regions.  And the world's Internet exchange
points -- facilities where network traffic is traded -- are indicated, with
pointers to over 200 facilities in 76 countries (see
http://www.telegeography.com/ix).

INTERNATIONAL INTERNET INDICATORS

A guide to the other metrics used to size the Internet's global growth,
including country-by-country Internet user counts; the spread of different
languages on the Internet; and the nature of links between sites in one
country and another.  Pointers to pertinent projects are provided, and a
geographical twist on the tried-and-true host counts is included.
Reference pages provide easy access to Internet and telephony country
codes, and include a "bit primer" to match bandwidth technologies with
their speeds.



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