Sunlit Uplands

Christopher Ogg writes (in the guest book):

As you appear to have passed into sunlit uplands with IslandTel, could you please ask them (over tea and scones, no doubt) if they could check their routing tables to see why it takes so many hops to get from their network to ISN’s?

This very fact has always been a Big Practical Problem for me, as Reinvented’s own gear is on the ISN network, and bandwidth to my office is on the Island Tel network. I checked last night, and my traffic from my office desktop to my office server was travelling 19 hops, through Toronto, Montreal and New York, to get 3 blocks up Richmond Street.

This situation is, of course, insane, and in the good old days of the Internet somebody would have seen this insanity and suggested that ISN and Island Tel install a mini-MAE East (in other words, connecting their networks locally, rather than through their far-upstream providers), therein giving ISN customers better access to Island Tel-connected resources, and vice versa. They could even set things up to measure the traffic in each direction and, just like transport trucks do, settle up at the end of each month to make things all equitable.

But, alas, this hasn’t happened (although I’ve suggested it, and, I think, ISN has suggested it) and I’m prone to thinking that, because of Island Tel’s control and dominance issues, it never will.

<img src=”https://ruk.ca/sites/ruk.ca/files/media.ruk.ca/traceroute.gif” width=330 height=231 alt=Traceroute from me to www.isn.net”>