[afnog] How to convince providers to take the sane option....

[Mark Tinka]

On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 09:52:00 AM Mathieu Paonessa 
wrote:

> 	- Their cost on international link + transit in 
London
> is less expensive than what they pay on their African
> ISP. They do pure cost based routing and don't care at
> all about the performance.

I would have said this to be true as recently as 12x months 
ago. But based on the little information I have about the 
state of the market in eastern and southern Africa, it is 
actually slightly more expensive to run a private circuit to 
Europe and buy IP from there (which kills intra-African 
routing) than it is to hand-off a local x-connect within 
Africa for an IP port (which helps intra-African routing).

Certainly, there is sufficiently affordable fibre in this 
part of the continent that getting yourself to the nearest 
exchange point will not break the bank.

> 	- They may peer with an other upstream of the other
> countries' ISP. Since they get the route thru peering
> and probably have a better local pref, then they route
> traffic based also on cost and not on performance.

While not optimal, I wouldn't mind this as such because 
traffic never leaves the continent. So this would be a 
welcome step to the utopic goal.

> 	- They are doing some kind of peering war and choose
> deliberately to route traffic to a crappy path in order
> to force the other guy to peer or to protect their local
> market for some reason.

I may be talking out the side of my neck, but from what I 
know, this is not happening in eastern (and most parts of 
southern) Africa.

I have, however, seen this happen in South Africa. 
Admittedly, the peering environment in South Africa is a 
little more evolved than in other parts of Africa, so this 
kind of peering war would not surprise me for .za.

> Those three can only be fixed by customer pressure asking
> for better performance and raising trouble tickets...

There is no shortage of customer tickets, because some ISP's 
are too small to afford the ability of having the choice 
that leads to inconsistent routing in the first place - so 
they can only buy from a local African ISP. And this is not 
a bad thing.

However, even with this, you still get back the response, as 
Andrew already mentioned, "Sorry, this is how we do it and 
end of story".

It doesn't mean the issues can't get fixed, it just means 
you need to put in a lot more energy to that end, just to 
get even one fix, let alone all of them.

> 	- None of the above apply and they just don't have 
any
> clue what they are doing. That's probably what is
> happening here (and in Andrews' case) and that's also
> the hardest point to fix.

I think there is also a reasonable dose of that. In such 
cases, a peer or provider has to work with its peer or 
customer in order to educate them on how routing 
consistently benefits them in the long run.

For some ISP's, cost is a bigger driver than performance. 
But that is true the world over. The difference is that in 
the rest of the world (particulary Europe and North America, 
which are reasonably fibre-dense), inconsistent routing does 
not have as huge a latency impact as it does in Africa, as 
all the content being accessed is on the same continent 
anyway.

Mark.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://afnog.org/pipermail/afnog/attachments/20140514/05d2c659/attachment.sig>