Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 16:11, Josh Luthman wrote:

Mark,

Use the 12 foot ladder to get over the 10 foot paywall:

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fbusiness%2Fwill-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry%2F21806999


Hehe, thanks :-).

So yeah, it sort of mirrors my thinking... there is certainly some ways 
to go for AWS (and Google, and Microsoft) to catch up with the 
establishment. However, as we've seen in the past, these things happen 
quickly, and legacy always seems to get taken by surprise.


The question is whether telco has learned from its past mistakes, of 
doing whatever it can to keep content out by either delivering its own 
"inferior" app alternatives, or attempting to block content from riding 
the network.


Things could have been different for telco if we didn't try to rent-seek 
from content 20+ years ago, which forced them to build out on their own 
and run networks even larger than telco could ever dream of.


Will telco hold on tightly to their edge gear and spectrum, while 
content tries to take the EPC core, or will they, for once, have a 
meeting of the minds?


The next half-decade should fun to watch.

Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 21:56, Michael Thomas wrote:


What I was thinking of is more of "over the top" where I don't need to 
be an Xfinity customer (lot least of which is that I can't).




I've seen MNO's partner with other providers to run a VLAN for their 
service on their wi-fi network. For various reasons, one of which 
involves ease of use by an MNO customer, it hasn't really taken off.


Reminds me of the days when you needed to insert a login and APN to 
access the GPRS network between 2007 - 2009. Adoption of mobile data 
became so much simpler when the phones and SIM cards came pre-configured 
to "just connect" to the data network.


It's nice to see your mobile provider's SSID on some random wi-fi 
hotspot. But if using it is such a drama, folk will be happy to struggle 
with 3G or even EDGE.


Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 20:06, Michael Thomas wrote:

That's what I've been trying to figure out as well. The use case of 
seamless handoff across large regions is fairly niche imo. Sure that 
was the original motivation for cell phones, but smartphones are about 
as statically located as laptops and nobody is rushing to get their 
laptops seamless handoff capabilites. That handoff capability comes at 
a tremendous cost in both spectrum and coverage.


Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of 
them for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee 
to manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need 
expensive spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a 
federation of "guestnets".


Yes - WiFi Offload is more attractive to MNO's than building out more 
base stations, I believe. The problem is that it's easier if they could 
do this without also having to roll out a large scale wi-fi network, 
themselves.


So they have to focus on one, and I've tended to find wi-fi deployments 
by MNO's take more of a back seat, as it's about reaching as many 
customers as possible, even at the lowest common denominator of performance.


Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Jay Hennigan]

On 1/25/22 11:44, Matthew Petach wrote:


Which is pretty much what Xfinity is already offering
to their subscribers; use your xfinity login to get onto
the wifi access points of other xfinity users all around
the country, relatively seamlessly.


Which is a major hassle if you have your own APs and just want^H^H^H^H 
have no practical choice other than to use their Internet, as their CPE 
includes a radio that does nothing for you and that you can't turn off.


I had to escalate through many layers of "support" to get to someone who 
could disable their enabled-by-default interference and noise generator 
after threatening to open up the box and cut the appropriate trace.


--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Flow collection and analysis

[John Schiel]

Samplicator is a nifty tool.

--John

On 1/25/22 16:50, Compton, Rich A wrote:


Elastiflow is pretty cool. https://www.elastiflow.com  or the old open 
source version: https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow


You can pretty much do the same thing with Elastic’s filebeat 
(https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/filebeat-module-netflow.html). 



Pmacct is also good for grabbing netflow http://www.pmacct.net and 
sending it somewhere (file, database, kafka, etc.) You can also grab 
BMP and streaming telemetry with it.


If you’re looking for open source DDoS detection using netflow, check 
out https://github.com/pavel-odintsov/fastnetmon


Shameless plug, check out my tool to look for spoofed UDP 
amplification request traffic coming into your network 
https://github.com/racompton/tattle-tale


FYI, you can send netflow to multiple collectors with 
https://github.com/sleinen/samplicator


-Rich

*From: *NANOG  on 
behalf of David Bass 

*Date: *Tuesday, January 25, 2022 at 11:06 AM
*To: *Christopher Morrow 
*Cc: *NANOG list 
*Subject: *[EXTERNAL] Re: Flow collection and analysis

*CAUTION:*The e-mail below is from an external source. Please exercise 
caution before opening attachments, clicking links, or following 
guidance.


Most of these things, yes.

Add:

Troubleshooting/operational support

Customer reporting

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 1:38 PM Christopher Morrow 
 wrote:


On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:53 AM David Bass
 wrote:

Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks
out there are using these days for netflow data collection,
and your opinion on the tool?

a question not asked, and answer not provided here, is:
  "What are you actually trying to do with the netflow?"

Answers of the form:
  "Dos detection and mitigation planning"
  "Discover peering options/opportunities"
  "billing customers"

  "traffic analysis for future network planning"

  "abuse monitoring/management/investigations"

  "pretty noc graphs"

are helpful.. I'm sure other answers would as well.. but: "how do
you collect?" is "with a collector" and isn't super helpful if the
collector can't feed into the tooling / infrastructure / long-term
goal you have.

The contents of this e-mail message and
any attachments are intended solely for the
addressee(s) and may contain confidential
and/or legally privileged information. If you
are not the intended recipient of this message
or if this message has been addressed to you
in error, please immediately alert the sender
by reply e-mail and then delete this message
and any attachments. If you are not the
intended recipient, you are notified that
any use, dissemination, distribution, copying,
or storage of this message or any attachment
is strictly prohibited. 

Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Laura Smith via NANOG]

On Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 at 23:50, Compton, Rich A 
 wrote:

> You can pretty much do the same thing with Elastic’s filebeat 
> (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/filebeat-module-netflow.html).
>   
>

Has Elastic decided to join the rest of the world in the 21st century yet ?

Last time I looked at it (not too many years ago) they had no TLS support.  Bit 
of a show-stopper in today's security environment.

Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Compton, Rich A]

Elastiflow is pretty cool.  https://www.elastiflow.com  or the old open source 
version: https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow
You can pretty much do the same thing with Elastic’s filebeat 
(https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/filebeat-module-netflow.html).
Pmacct is also good for grabbing netflow http://www.pmacct.net  and sending it 
somewhere (file, database, kafka, etc.) You can also grab BMP and streaming 
telemetry with it.
If you’re looking for open source DDoS detection using netflow, check out 
https://github.com/pavel-odintsov/fastnetmon
Shameless plug, check out my tool to look for spoofed UDP amplification request 
traffic coming into your network https://github.com/racompton/tattle-tale
FYI, you can send netflow to multiple collectors with 
https://github.com/sleinen/samplicator

-Rich

From: NANOG  on behalf of 
David Bass 
Date: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 at 11:06 AM
To: Christopher Morrow 
Cc: NANOG list 
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Flow collection and analysis

CAUTION: The e-mail below is from an external source. Please exercise caution 
before opening attachments, clicking links, or following guidance.
Most of these things, yes.

Add:
Troubleshooting/operational support
Customer reporting




On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 1:38 PM Christopher Morrow 
mailto:morrowc.li...@gmail.com>> wrote:


On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:53 AM David Bass 
mailto:davidbass...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are using 
these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?

a question not asked, and answer not provided here, is:
  "What are you actually trying to do with the netflow?"

Answers of the form:
  "Dos detection and mitigation planning"
  "Discover peering options/opportunities"
  "billing customers"
  "traffic analysis for future network planning"
  "abuse monitoring/management/investigations"
  "pretty noc graphs"

are helpful.. I'm sure other answers would as well.. but: "how do you collect?" 
is "with a collector" and isn't super helpful if the collector can't feed into 
the tooling / infrastructure / long-term goal you have.
E-MAIL CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: 
The contents of this e-mail message and any attachments are intended solely for 
the addressee(s) and may contain confidential and/or legally privileged 
information. If you are not the intended recipient of this message or if this 
message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender 
by reply e-mail and then delete this message and any attachments. If you are 
not the intended recipient, you are notified that any use, dissemination, 
distribution, copying, or storage of this message or any attachment is strictly 
prohibited.

RE: Flow collection and analysis

[Jean St-Laurent via NANOG]

I agree with you.

 

The tool doesn’t really matter. Windows, linux, cloud or not.

 

It’s really important to first understand what are you trying to solve or 
improve?

 

If this step is forgotten, then it will just be another tool to support to add 
in your long list of useless tools.

 

My personal favorites are a mix of:

 

*   Ntop with PF_RING enabled.
*   Nfdump
*   Elasticsearch 

 

I’m sure all the other tools are also very good. Csv in excel or grep/awk could 
also work if you know exactly what you’re looking for. 

 

Jean

 

 

From: NANOG  On Behalf Of Christopher 
Morrow
Sent: January 25, 2022 12:38 PM
To: David Bass 
Cc:  
Subject: Re: Flow collection and analysis

 

 

 

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:53 AM David Bass mailto:davidbass...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are using 
these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?

 

a question not asked, and answer not provided here, is:
  "What are you actually trying to do with the netflow?"

 

Answers of the form:
  "Dos detection and mitigation planning"
  "Discover peering options/opportunities"
  "billing customers"

  "traffic analysis for future network planning"

  "abuse monitoring/management/investigations"

  "pretty noc graphs"

 

are helpful.. I'm sure other answers would as well.. but: "how do you collect?" 
is "with a collector" and isn't super helpful if the collector can't feed into 
the tooling / infrastructure / long-term goal you have.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Michael Thomas]

On 1/25/22 11:44 AM, Matthew Petach wrote:



On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:11 AM Michael Thomas  wrote:


[...]

Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of
them
for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee to
manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need expensive
spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a federation of
"guestnets".

Mike


Which is pretty much what Xfinity is already offering
to their subscribers; use your xfinity login to get onto
the wifi access points of other xfinity users all around
the country, relatively seamlessly.

I'm sure other networks that provide their own CPE are
likely to follow suit as well.


What I was thinking of is more of "over the top" where I don't need to 
be an Xfinity customer (lot least of which is that I can't).


It does seems that providing the CPE is inevitable though, but for a lot 
of people that's feature not a bug.


Mike

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Keith Stokes]

Cox has been doing this for awhile.

On 1/25/22 13:44, Matthew Petach wrote:



On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:11 AM Michael Thomas  wrote:


[...]

Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of
them
for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee to
manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need expensive
spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a federation of
"guestnets".

Mike


Which is pretty much what Xfinity is already offering
to their subscribers; use your xfinity login to get onto
the wifi access points of other xfinity users all around
the country, relatively seamlessly.

I'm sure other networks that provide their own CPE are
likely to follow suit as well.

Matt

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Matthew Petach]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:11 AM Michael Thomas  wrote:

>
> [...]
>
> Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of them
> for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee to
> manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need expensive
> spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a federation of
> "guestnets".
>
> Mike
>

Which is pretty much what Xfinity is already offering
to their subscribers; use your xfinity login to get onto
the wifi access points of other xfinity users all around
the country, relatively seamlessly.

I'm sure other networks that provide their own CPE are
likely to follow suit as well.

Matt

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Laura Smith via NANOG]

‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐

On Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 at 16:44, Mel Beckman  wrote:

> We use, depending on the situation, Intermapper, PRTG, and NTop.
>
> PRTG includes its web-based flow collector and viewer for free, and there is 
> even a free 100-sensor edition of the product that lets you use just the flow 
> stuff fir free forever.
>

Once upon a time we used to use PRTG.

Nothing bad to say about it as a product, apart from the fact it only runs on 
Windows.

It is an unfortunate fact in today's world with Microsoft's desire to push 
everyone to Azure and make on-prem licensing increasingly unattractive.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Michael Thomas]

On 1/25/22 6:11 AM, Josh Luthman wrote:

Mark,

Use the 12 foot ladder to get over the 10 foot paywall:

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fbusiness%2Fwill-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry%2F21806999


Yeah, sorry I didn't know what their paywall looked like since I subscribe

Mike




On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 4:12 AM Mark Tinka  wrote:



On 1/19/22 21:52, Michael Thomas wrote:

>
> There was an article in the Economist (sorry if it's paywalled)
about
> Dish entering the mobile market using an AWS backend. I don't think
> that AWS brings much more than compute for the most part so I don't
> really get why this would be a huge win. A win maybe, but a huge
win?
> I can certainly see that not having tons of legacy and accreted
> inertia is big win, but that's true of any disruptor. In the end
they
> still need base stations, spectrum, backhaul and all of that to run
> their network, right?
>
> Am I missing something, or is this mainly hype?
>
> Mike
>
>

https://www.economist.com/business/will-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry/21806999

>

It's behind a pay wall, so can't read the entire article.

But AFAICT, the way AWS's 5G service works is that they can
provide an
entire solution (towers, backhaul, back-end, even SIM cards), or just
the back-end.

I believe the latter is called Wavelength:

https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/features/

I'd say it is a legitimate threat to traditional MNO's. One does not
require to build a national-scale mobile network from scratch...
if you
can service a small community of some 500 people in a manner that is
affordable to them, and gives you a nice return so you can buy
some food
at the end of each month, no reason why that is not a successful and
sustainable model.

Heck, you probably don't even need to offer classic voice and SMS
services. There are plenty of IP-based apps that will do this for
you,
and I know many people who have totally given up packages that
include
voice minutes and SMS messages, in favour of data-only services from
their MNO. They are thriving.

So if a small mobile operator using AWS 5G as a back-end does not
need
to negotiate massive interconnect contracts and deals with other
telco's
in the area, and their handful of customers are fine with just
Internet
access as the only service, makes a lot of sense to me.

As I've been saying for a long time now, the telco model is a
dying one.
Customers only care about the problems we can help them solve, not
whether we are a Tier-1, or how many TV shows were "Brought to you
by..."

Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Michael Thomas]

On 1/25/22 6:02 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:



On 1/25/22 15:45, Masataka Ohta wrote:


As is stated in free part of the article that:

The country’s three biggest carriers, AT, Verizon and
T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
this differed little from the earlier 4G.

5G is nothing. That's all.


Considering the relatively decent performance of 4G/LTE, especially as 
fibre + wi-fi is more rife, particularly in the dense metropolitan 
areas that would be fibre-rich, with folk offloading a lot more of 
their traffic to wi-fi in lieu of GSM, I am still struggling to see 
the 5G use-case, outside of implementing 3GPP specs. for their own sake.


By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer 
5G. So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same place.


Ah well...

As far as AWS 5G goes, they don't have to be locked into just 5G. 
De-risking the back-end for non-traditional greenfields would allow 
them to even support GPRS if it made sense. It's all software and CPU.


That's what I've been trying to figure out as well. The use case of 
seamless handoff across large regions is fairly niche imo. Sure that was 
the original motivation for cell phones, but smartphones are about as 
statically located as laptops and nobody is rushing to get their laptops 
seamless handoff capabilites. That handoff capability comes at a 
tremendous cost in both spectrum and coverage.


Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of them 
for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee to 
manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need expensive 
spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a federation of 
"guestnets".


Mike

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[David Bass]

Most of these things, yes.

Add:
Troubleshooting/operational support
Customer reporting




On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 1:38 PM Christopher Morrow 
wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:53 AM David Bass 
> wrote:
>
>> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are
>> using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?
>
>
> a question not asked, and answer not provided here, is:
>   "What are you actually trying to do with the netflow?"
>
> Answers of the form:
>   "Dos detection and mitigation planning"
>   "Discover peering options/opportunities"
>   "billing customers"
>   "traffic analysis for future network planning"
>   "abuse monitoring/management/investigations"
>   "pretty noc graphs"
>
> are helpful.. I'm sure other answers would as well.. but: "how do you
> collect?" is "with a collector" and isn't super helpful if the collector
> can't feed into the tooling / infrastructure / long-term goal you have.
>

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Pierre LANCASTRE]

Hi,

There is also Elastiflow https://docs.elastiflow.com/docs/
https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow.

Cordialement / Best regards

Pierre Lancastre



Le mar. 25 janv. 2022 à 17:45, Mel Beckman  a écrit :

> We use, depending on the situation, Intermapper, PRTG, and NTop.
>
> Intermapper has the most powerful viewing app, but it’s expensive in that
> you have to pay for each flow collector. It’s an actual app (Windows, Mac,
> and Linux), rather than a web-based interface, so they can do more tricks
> with the GUI, like drill down and sorting.
>
> PRTG includes its web-based flow collector and viewer for free, and there
> is even a free 100-sensor edition of the product that lets you use just the
> flow stuff fir free forever.
>
> NTop is an open source web-based flow sensor and viewer, with a combo paid
> license model specifically for the flow collection. It connects directly to
> a mirror port and sucks up the flow info, where is the other products
> required to have some hardware device that exports flows. But you can get
> dirt cheap used Cisco routers that do this, such as the 1941, which
> although bulky do the job for a few hundred bucks. Once you get into 10 Gb
> speeds though you need dedicated hardware sensors in newer gear, which is
> pretty pricey. But if you have 10 Gb traffic you can afford it :-)
>
> Ntop also has a commercial arm called Nbox, Which has a range of hardware
> based ready to go solutions. However it’s all supported out of Italy, and
> pretty much by one guy, so we’ve had uneven results with customers that
> purchased it.
>
> -mel
>
> > On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:30 AM, Laura Smith via NANOG 
> wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 at 15:46, David Bass <
> davidbass...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there
> are using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the
> tool?
> >>
> >> Thanks!
> >
> >
> > Not a suggestion, but a question 
> >
> > Curious to know if anyone (apart from Cloudflare, obvs !) is using
> Goflow ? (https://github.com/cloudflare/goflow)
>

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Christopher Morrow]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:53 AM David Bass  wrote:

> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are
> using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?


a question not asked, and answer not provided here, is:
  "What are you actually trying to do with the netflow?"

Answers of the form:
  "Dos detection and mitigation planning"
  "Discover peering options/opportunities"
  "billing customers"
  "traffic analysis for future network planning"
  "abuse monitoring/management/investigations"
  "pretty noc graphs"

are helpful.. I'm sure other answers would as well.. but: "how do you
collect?" is "with a collector" and isn't super helpful if the collector
can't feed into the tooling / infrastructure / long-term goal you have.

Re: Long hops on international paths

[PAUL R BARFORD]

Hello Adam,

Thanks for your follow-up - it helps to clarify that we've been observing in 
our analysis.  The tradeoff between cost (100G+ links), manageability (related 
to BGP) and risk (i.e., concentration of high-value links in a few locations) 
is really interesting and not something that we were aware of.

PB

From: athomp...@merlin.mb.ca 
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 10:54 AM
To: PAUL R BARFORD ; davidbass...@gmail.com 

Cc: nanog@nanog.org 
Subject: RE: Long hops on international paths


Peering connection, I think, can explain this.

With some notable exceptions (all of whom participate here, I think), carriers 
still don’t throw around 100G+ peering routers around like sprinkles on a 
donut.  (Even those big networks don’t, it just looks like they do because 
they’re freaking huge.)

I suspect what you may be seeing is NOT “international carriers all concentrate 
on a single router” at all, but rather a) “large carriers tend to interconnect 
at only a few points” and b) “the best path from North America to Europe will 
therefore tend to always go through the same small set of inter-AS peering 
routers on this side”.

What you’ve described, purely in the public-visible layer 3 internet, is normal 
in my experience.  I would fully expect upwards of 90% of my daily traffic 
crosses one of 3 peering routers in my network, no surprise there, but ALSO I 
estimate at least 80% of it crosses one of no more than 5 or 6 routers even as 
I get 5, 6, 7, 8 hops away from me.  The internet isn’t as diversely-pathed as 
it once was.

In the MPLS carrier case, I’m aware of a couple that use MPLS to tunnel peering 
traffic from their edge back to a centralized “core” router that speaks BGP.  
Not sure how common this is, I have a very small sample set.  But in this 
example, no matter how diverse the carrier is at L1/L2, your L3 investigation 
will always hit the same much-smaller set of routers.



To directly answer your question, the cost/benefit is driven by the fact that 
running BGP is (relatively) complicated, error-prone and expensive, compared to 
not running BGP.  And those routers running BGP are (broadly speaking) the 
routers controlling inter-carrier traffic.  So the “chokepoints” naturally 
occur as an emergent property of each carrier controlling their own operational 
and financial risk.  Very much depends on the carrier and their operational 
philosophy.  I know nearly nothing about Telia, but Zayo doesn’t (didn’t? did 
they get bought?) have a lot of peering routers – they were historically more 
of an L2 and/or Private-network operator, as I understand it.  (I was never a 
customer, so that’s hearsay.)

-Adam



Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
[MERLIN]
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athomp...@merlin.mb.ca
www.merlin.mb.ca



From: NANOG  On Behalf Of PAUL 
R BARFORD
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 8:49 AM
To: davidbass...@gmail.com
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Long hops on international paths



Hello David,



Understanding the physical topology of the network is not​ our objective.  What 
we're trying to understand is the logical topology revealed by traceroute (we 
are well-aware of traceroute limitations) and why a relatively small set of 
routers in different countries tend to have the majority of the international 
connections.  Our expectation was that layer 3 connectivity revealed in 
traceroute to be relatively evenly spread out along coasts and near submarine 
landing points.  We're not seeing that.  So, the question is what is the 
cost/benefit to providers to configure/maintain routes (that include long MPLS 
tunnels) that tend to concentrate international connectivity at a relatively 
small number of routers?



Regards, PB



From: davidbass...@gmail.com 
mailto:davidbass...@gmail.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 8:22 AM
To: PAUL R BARFORD mailto:p...@cs.wisc.edu>>
Cc: morrowc.li...@gmail.com 
mailto:morrowc.li...@gmail.com>>; 
nanog@nanog.org 
mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>
Subject: Re: Long hops on international paths



I think a large part of your problem is that you’re using trace route to try 
and determine the full topology of a large complex network.  It won’t show the 
full topology.



On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 7:43 PM PAUL R BARFORD 
mailto:p...@cs.wisc.edu>> wrote:

What we're considering specifically are consecutive (layer 3) hops as 
identified by traceroute.  Thus, TTL is decremented by 1 and no more than 1 
(i.e., we have to get full information (not *) from consecutive hops to 
consider the link).  I have asked my colleague to put together a set of 
examples.  We assume that there are multiple layer 1 and 2 links, and possibly 
layer 3 hops masked from traceroute by MPLS.  

RE: Long hops on international paths

[Adam Thompson]

Peering connection, I think, can explain this.
With some notable exceptions (all of whom participate here, I think), carriers 
still don’t throw around 100G+ peering routers around like sprinkles on a 
donut.  (Even those big networks don’t, it just looks like they do because 
they’re freaking huge.)
I suspect what you may be seeing is NOT “international carriers all concentrate 
on a single router” at all, but rather a) “large carriers tend to interconnect 
at only a few points” and b) “the best path from North America to Europe will 
therefore tend to always go through the same small set of inter-AS peering 
routers on this side”.
What you’ve described, purely in the public-visible layer 3 internet, is normal 
in my experience.  I would fully expect upwards of 90% of my daily traffic 
crosses one of 3 peering routers in my network, no surprise there, but ALSO I 
estimate at least 80% of it crosses one of no more than 5 or 6 routers even as 
I get 5, 6, 7, 8 hops away from me.  The internet isn’t as diversely-pathed as 
it once was.
In the MPLS carrier case, I’m aware of a couple that use MPLS to tunnel peering 
traffic from their edge back to a centralized “core” router that speaks BGP.  
Not sure how common this is, I have a very small sample set.  But in this 
example, no matter how diverse the carrier is at L1/L2, your L3 investigation 
will always hit the same much-smaller set of routers.

To directly answer your question, the cost/benefit is driven by the fact that 
running BGP is (relatively) complicated, error-prone and expensive, compared to 
not running BGP.  And those routers running BGP are (broadly speaking) the 
routers controlling inter-carrier traffic.  So the “chokepoints” naturally 
occur as an emergent property of each carrier controlling their own operational 
and financial risk.  Very much depends on the carrier and their operational 
philosophy.  I know nearly nothing about Telia, but Zayo doesn’t (didn’t? did 
they get bought?) have a lot of peering routers – they were historically more 
of an L2 and/or Private-network operator, as I understand it.  (I was never a 
customer, so that’s hearsay.)
-Adam

Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
[MERLIN]
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athomp...@merlin.mb.ca
www.merlin.mb.ca

From: NANOG  On Behalf Of PAUL 
R BARFORD
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 8:49 AM
To: davidbass...@gmail.com
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Long hops on international paths

Hello David,

Understanding the physical topology of the network is not​ our objective.  What 
we're trying to understand is the logical topology revealed by traceroute (we 
are well-aware of traceroute limitations) and why a relatively small set of 
routers in different countries tend to have the majority of the international 
connections.  Our expectation was that layer 3 connectivity revealed in 
traceroute to be relatively evenly spread out along coasts and near submarine 
landing points.  We're not seeing that.  So, the question is what is the 
cost/benefit to providers to configure/maintain routes (that include long MPLS 
tunnels) that tend to concentrate international connectivity at a relatively 
small number of routers?

Regards, PB

From: davidbass...@gmail.com 
mailto:davidbass...@gmail.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 8:22 AM
To: PAUL R BARFORD mailto:p...@cs.wisc.edu>>
Cc: morrowc.li...@gmail.com 
mailto:morrowc.li...@gmail.com>>; 
nanog@nanog.org 
mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>
Subject: Re: Long hops on international paths

I think a large part of your problem is that you’re using trace route to try 
and determine the full topology of a large complex network.  It won’t show the 
full topology.

On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 7:43 PM PAUL R BARFORD 
mailto:p...@cs.wisc.edu>> wrote:
What we're considering specifically are consecutive (layer 3) hops as 
identified by traceroute.  Thus, TTL is decremented by 1 and no more than 1 
(i.e., we have to get full information (not *) from consecutive hops to 
consider the link).  I have asked my colleague to put together a set of 
examples.  We assume that there are multiple layer 1 and 2 links, and possibly 
layer 3 hops masked from traceroute by MPLS.  But what we're seeing in terms of 
hops exposed by traceroute make it look like a single (TTL decremented by 1) 
hop.

I'll post the examples when I get them.

PB

From: morrowc.li...@gmail.com 
mailto:morrowc.li...@gmail.com>>
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2022 5:13 PM
To: PAUL R BARFORD mailto:p...@cs.wisc.edu>>
Cc: Pengxiong Zhu mailto:pzhu...@ucr.edu>>; 
nanog@nanog.org 
mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>

Subject: Re: Long hops on international paths



On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Mel Beckman]

We use, depending on the situation, Intermapper, PRTG, and NTop. 

Intermapper has the most powerful viewing app, but it’s expensive in that you 
have to pay for each flow collector. It’s an actual app (Windows, Mac, and 
Linux), rather than a web-based interface, so they can do more tricks with the 
GUI, like drill down and sorting.

PRTG includes its web-based flow collector and viewer for free, and there is 
even a free 100-sensor edition of the product that lets you use just the flow 
stuff fir free forever.

NTop is an open source web-based flow sensor and viewer, with a combo paid 
license model specifically for the flow collection. It connects directly to a 
mirror port and sucks up the flow info, where is the other products required to 
have some hardware device that exports flows. But you can get dirt cheap used 
Cisco routers that do this, such as the 1941, which although bulky do the job 
for a few hundred bucks. Once you get into 10 Gb speeds though you need 
dedicated hardware sensors in newer gear, which is pretty pricey. But if you 
have 10 Gb traffic you can afford it :-)

Ntop also has a commercial arm called Nbox, Which has a range of hardware based 
ready to go solutions. However it’s all supported out of Italy, and pretty much 
by one guy, so we’ve had uneven results with customers that purchased it.

-mel

> On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:30 AM, Laura Smith via NANOG  wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 at 15:46, David Bass  
> wrote:
> 
>> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are 
>> using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?
>> 
>> Thanks!
> 
> 
> Not a suggestion, but a question 
> 
> Curious to know if anyone (apart from Cloudflare, obvs !) is using Goflow ? 
> (https://github.com/cloudflare/goflow)

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Laura Smith via NANOG]

On Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 at 15:46, David Bass  
wrote:

> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are 
> using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?
>
> Thanks!


Not a suggestion, but a question 

Curious to know if anyone (apart from Cloudflare, obvs !) is using Goflow ? 
(https://github.com/cloudflare/goflow)

Re: Operator survey: Incrementally deployable secure Internet routing

[Adrian Perrig]

Hi Scott

> "Do you use countries as ISDs? Doesn't that create opportunities for
government intervention and censorship?
> I asked about the ISDs and put a FAQ you have as an example.  I didn't
ask about the SBAS.  It seems to me that the ingress/egress of an ISD is
the place a government surveillance network would reside.  All country
internet communications go through a chokepoint to get on the SBAS, so it's
easier to surveil the population.  Especially if you envision the ISD to
have its own DNS.

You're referring to the FAQ on page 409 of the SCION book:
https://www.scion-architecture.net/pdf/SCION-book.pdf
The following question in the book is about government censorship, stating
the arguments why censorship is more challenging in SCION than in today's
Internet. As we have witnessed in the past, censorship has been successful
in today's Internet.

Note that the ISD concept represents a virtual grouping of ASes, an AS can
be part of several ISDs at the same time. When you look at the ISD concept,
it brings transparency and scalability rather than facilitate censorship. A
recent paper shows that (partially thanks to ISDs) scalability of SCION
inter-domain routing is much improved compared to BGP or BGPsec, with about
200 times lower overhead than BGP and 1000 times lower overhead than BGPsec
on a per-path basis:
https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/2021_conext_deployment.pdf

> What will you do about space?  The moon?  (That one's coming sooner that
folks might expect:
https://www.nokia.com/networks/insights/network-on-the-moon)

As for network deployments on the Moon, SCION can bring advantages there as
well, for instance a "moon ISD" will make it easy to ensure that
moon-to-moon packets don't inadvertently take a detour via a terrestrial
router. A related result that may be of interest to the operator community
is our analysis of using path-aware networking for integrating LEO
satellite networks into the Internet:
https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/ccr-ibis-2020.pdf

> Will each ISD (ISD = Isolation Domain) have it's own DNS?

The SCION DNS story has evolved much since the first book, to only use a
single global name space in the current design (which is written up in the
new SCION book that will go to the printer next week, ping me if you'd like
to see a pre-print).

All the best
  Adrian



On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 2:00 AM scott  wrote:

>
>
> Hello,
>
> "are described in further detail in the survey"
>
> Doing the survey gives legitimacy to something I feel is not correct
>
> ---
>
> "We understand the privacy concern. As for SBAS, the backbone is operated
> in a federated manner among PoP operators."
>
> I asked about the ISDs and put a FAQ you have as an example.  I didn't ask
> about the SBAS.  It seems to me that the ingress/egress of an ISD is the
> place a government surveillance network would reside.  All country internet
> communications go through a chokepoint to get on the SBAS, so it's easier
> to surveil the population.  Especially if you envision the ISD to have its
> own DNS.
>
> scott
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1/22/2022 5:22 PM, Yixin Sun wrote:
>
> Hi Scott,
>
> Thank you for your comment! We understand the privacy concern. As for
> SBAS, the backbone is operated in a federated manner among PoP operators.
> In our current deployment, the PoP operators are located across three
> continents. On the other hand, due to the federated structure of the SBAS
> PoP operators, a governance structure is needed to coordinate global
> operation. We have outlined four potential governance models, i.e., ICANN
> and Regional Internet Registries, a multi-stakeholder organization, a
> federation of network providers, or a decentralized governance model. The
> four models are described in further detail in the survey, and we would
> love to hear your opinions about them.
>
> Best,
> Yixin
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 8:24 PM scott  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 1/21/2022 12:07 PM, Yixin Sun wrote:
>>
>>
>> We appreciate that your time is very precious, but we wanted to ask you
>> for your help in answering a brief survey about a new secure routing system
>> we have developed in a research collaboration between ETH, Princeton
>> University, and University of Virginia. We'd like to thank those of you who
>> have already helped us fill out the survey and provided insightful
>> feedback. Your input is critical for helping inform our further work on
>> this project.
>>
>> Here is the link to our survey, which takes about 10 minutes to complete,
>> including watching a brief 3-minute introductory video:
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc4VCkqd7i88y0CbJ31B7tVXyxBlhEy_zsYZByx6tsKAE7ROg/viewform?usp=pp_url=NANOG+mailing+list
>>
>> Our architecture, called Secure Backbone AS (SBAS), allows clients to
>> benefit from emerging secure routing deployments like SCION by tunneling
>> into a secure infrastructure. SBAS provides substantial routing security
>> improvements when retrofitted to the current 

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Kevin Glass via NANOG]

My company uses Auvik. It's easy to setup but needs some tuning and is 
furiously expensive. The traffic analysis is pretty good and can be export for 
you to use in other tools. If netflow is all you are using it for look 
elsewhere regardless of what a sales person sales.

Kevin

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022, at 10:46 AM, David Bass wrote:
> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are 
> using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?
> 
> Thanks!

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[John Kristoff]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2022 11:46:14 -0400
David Bass  wrote:

> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there
> are using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on
> the tool?

Two open source tools you might consider:

  nfdump 
  pmacct 

John

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Joe Loiacono]

If your looking to go low-cost (free) try:

1) Carnegie/Mellon's very robust, flexible and efficient collector 
analyzer (command line): SiLK - https://tools.netsa.cert.org/silk


2) FlowViewer - A comprehensive web-based user interface for SiLK which 
provides textual, graphical analysis, long term tracking and dashboard: 
http:flowviewer.net or https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer


Best!

Joe


On 1/25/2022 10:46 AM, David Bass wrote:
Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there 
are using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on 
the tool?


Thanks!

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 17:46, David Bass wrote:

Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there 
are using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on 
the tool?


Kentik.

Happy.

Mark.

Re: Flow collection and analysis

[Dave]

I’ll be the minority voice here - I have been very happy with Argus  
(qosient.com) but it does not have a GUI and that seems to be a factor for some

Dave

> On Jan 25, 2022, at 10:46 AM, David Bass  wrote:
> 
> Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are 
> using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?
> 
> Thanks!

Flow collection and analysis

[David Bass]

Wondering what others in the small to medium sized networks out there are
using these days for netflow data collection, and your opinion on the tool?

Thanks!

Re: Operator survey: Incrementally deployable secure Internet routing

[Adrian Perrig]

Hi Laura

> With the greatest of respect I'm afraid this kind of exemplifies the sort
of dream-ware that can only be thought up in the cozy confines of a
university campus.

Indeed, that's the origin of many innovations -- and some of them do make
it into the real world.

> So the chances of something more drastic like your proposal ever seeing
the light of day beyond some university labs?

We already have a working prototype system. It's quite exciting to see how
the existing SCION backbone can be used to provide immediate benefits for
traditional IP end hosts.

> Sorry to rain on your parade guys!

No problem, thank you for your honest feedback! It is very important to
gather these opinions / viewpoints.

All the best
  Adrian


On Mon, Jan 24, 2022 at 10:32 PM Laura Smith via NANOG 
wrote:

> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
>
> On Friday, January 21st, 2022 at 22:07, Yixin Sun <
> yix...@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
>
> > Dear Nanog,
> >
> > We appreciate that your time is very precious, but we wanted to ask you
> for your help in answering a brief survey about a new secure routing system
> we have developed in a research collaboration between ETH, Princeton
> University, and University of Virginia.
>
>
> Prateek, Adrian, and Yixin,
>
> With the greatest of respect I'm afraid this kind of exemplifies the sort
> of dream-ware that can only be thought up in the cozy confines of a
> university campus.
>
> Why do I say this ?
>
> Because the first thing that I thought of when I read the subject line of
> your email and a cursory glance through the body was "Uh huh, I've heard
> this sort of thing somewhere before", and that somewhere was 
>
> IPv6 was sold as "incrementally deployable", and with IPv6 we're talking
> something natively dual-stack operating over the same old "internet".
>
> And look where we are today ? A decade or so on and the world is still
> nowhere near 100% IPv6 coverage, with some major networks still not
> anywhere near, and with other major networks only just launching IPv6 (e.g.
> the hyperscalers ... or at least some of them).  And that's before we start
> considering the developing world.
>
> Or if we put IPv6 to one side.  Why do you think BGP is *still* so
> stubbornly here ?  Because it works (most of the time), everyone knows how
> it works, and its been battle tested.
>
> So the chances of something more drastic like your proposal ever seeing
> the light of day beyond some university labs ?
>
> Sorry to rain on your parade guys !
>
> Laura
>
>
>

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Masataka Ohta]

Mark Tinka wrote:


By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer
5G. So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same
place.


As 802 is for LANMAN, all we need is 802.11 for MAN maybe combined
with IP mobility.

Masataka Ohta

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 16:14, Ca By wrote:

I would say its all actually billions of $$ in spectrum and patent 
fees… hardware parts are a rounding error.


Yes, the majority of the cost is in bidding and competing for spectrum. 
It's a whole song & dance.


But also, depending on just how much of a cash-cow the business is, 
physically building out the network is nothing to scoff at either.





The more interesting story is at

1. Tell everyone you are build an open source core network on 
openstack (lol)


2. Build it, put it into prod, then disown it into the linux foundation

3. Admit you built an albatross , then pay Azure to take it off your 
hands, and thus losing any control of your network.


:-).

Wouldn't be the first time this has happened before, except back then, 
it was all hardware, and not virtualization.


Ah, the telco - we are good and walking over our own steps, just with 
bigger or smaller shoes, than before.


Mark.

Re: Telia is now Arelion

[Joe Provo]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 02:47:17PM -0600, Mike Hammett wrote:
> I do want to point out that it isn't a mindless name change like
> Xfinity, Spectrum, or Lumen. It's because the company actually split
> off from Telia proper and thus, needed a new name.

And here I thought it was Telia getting back to its spambone roots
[routes?] with a nod to Aleron.

-- 
Posted from my personal account - see X-Disclaimer header.
Joe Provo / Gweep / Earthling 

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Ca By]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 6:06 AM Mark Tinka  wrote:

>
>
> On 1/25/22 15:45, Masataka Ohta wrote:
>
> > As is stated in free part of the article that:
> >
> > The country’s three biggest carriers, AT, Verizon and
> > T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
> > this differed little from the earlier 4G.
> >
> > 5G is nothing. That's all.
>
> Considering the relatively decent performance of 4G/LTE, especially as
> fibre + wi-fi is more rife, particularly in the dense metropolitan areas
> that would be fibre-rich, with folk offloading a lot more of their
> traffic to wi-fi in lieu of GSM, I am still struggling to see the 5G
> use-case, outside of implementing 3GPP specs. for their own sake.
>
> By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer 5G.
> So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same place.
>
> Ah well...
>
> As far as AWS 5G goes, they don't have to be locked into just 5G.
> De-risking the back-end for non-traditional greenfields would allow them
> to even support GPRS if it made sense. It's all software and CPU.
>


I would say its all actually billions of $$ in spectrum and patent fees…
hardware parts are a rounding error.

The more interesting story is at

1. Tell everyone you are build an open source core network on openstack
(lol)

2. Build it, put it into prod, then disown it into the linux foundation

3. Admit you built an albatross , then pay Azure to take it off your hands,
and thus losing any control of your network.


> Mark.
>

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Josh Luthman]

Mark,

Use the 12 foot ladder to get over the 10 foot paywall:

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fbusiness%2Fwill-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry%2F21806999

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 4:12 AM Mark Tinka  wrote:

>
>
> On 1/19/22 21:52, Michael Thomas wrote:
>
> >
> > There was an article in the Economist (sorry if it's paywalled) about
> > Dish entering the mobile market using an AWS backend. I don't think
> > that AWS brings much more than compute for the most part so I don't
> > really get why this would be a huge win. A win maybe, but a huge win?
> > I can certainly see that not having tons of legacy and accreted
> > inertia is big win, but that's true of any disruptor. In the end they
> > still need base stations, spectrum, backhaul and all of that to run
> > their network, right?
> >
> > Am I missing something, or is this mainly hype?
> >
> > Mike
> >
> >
> https://www.economist.com/business/will-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry/21806999
> >
>
> It's behind a pay wall, so can't read the entire article.
>
> But AFAICT, the way AWS's 5G service works is that they can provide an
> entire solution (towers, backhaul, back-end, even SIM cards), or just
> the back-end.
>
> I believe the latter is called Wavelength:
>
>  https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/features/
>
> I'd say it is a legitimate threat to traditional MNO's. One does not
> require to build a national-scale mobile network from scratch... if you
> can service a small community of some 500 people in a manner that is
> affordable to them, and gives you a nice return so you can buy some food
> at the end of each month, no reason why that is not a successful and
> sustainable model.
>
> Heck, you probably don't even need to offer classic voice and SMS
> services. There are plenty of IP-based apps that will do this for you,
> and I know many people who have totally given up packages that include
> voice minutes and SMS messages, in favour of data-only services from
> their MNO. They are thriving.
>
> So if a small mobile operator using AWS 5G as a back-end does not need
> to negotiate massive interconnect contracts and deals with other telco's
> in the area, and their handful of customers are fine with just Internet
> access as the only service, makes a lot of sense to me.
>
> As I've been saying for a long time now, the telco model is a dying one.
> Customers only care about the problems we can help them solve, not
> whether we are a Tier-1, or how many TV shows were "Brought to you by..."
>
> Mark.
>
>

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 15:45, Masataka Ohta wrote:


As is stated in free part of the article that:

The country’s three biggest carriers, AT, Verizon and
T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
this differed little from the earlier 4G.

5G is nothing. That's all.


Considering the relatively decent performance of 4G/LTE, especially as 
fibre + wi-fi is more rife, particularly in the dense metropolitan areas 
that would be fibre-rich, with folk offloading a lot more of their 
traffic to wi-fi in lieu of GSM, I am still struggling to see the 5G 
use-case, outside of implementing 3GPP specs. for their own sake.


By one operator offering 5G, all other operators are forced to offer 5G. 
So they all end up spending billions to remain in the same place.


Ah well...

As far as AWS 5G goes, they don't have to be locked into just 5G. 
De-risking the back-end for non-traditional greenfields would allow them 
to even support GPRS if it made sense. It's all software and CPU.


Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Masataka Ohta]

Michael Thomas wrote:


Am I missing something, or is this mainly hype?


As is stated in free part of the article that:

The country’s three biggest carriers, AT, Verizon and
T-Mobile, have offered 5G connectivity but in practice
this differed little from the earlier 4G.

5G is nothing. That's all.

Masataka Ohta

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 14:33, sro...@ronan-online.com wrote:


It’s the frequency and the knowledge to configure the software and equipment 
that is still prohibitively expensive in many cases.


And I think this is where the AWS solution would be able to come into 
its own, just like they did with enterprise compute.


If they can abstract all of that and price it reasonably, the barrier to 
entry is significantly lowered.




And frankly, if you are only providing fixed access to 500 users, I’m not sure 
even the AWS solution is necessary. Because if you can configure the transport 
and the software you can probably run a handful of KVM servers.


Well, considering that this service is built both for private and public 
5G use-cases, I imagine the product is elastic enough to support 
whichever business model a non-traditional operator may want fulfilled.


For AWS, the infrastructure is already there. Whether you are looking to 
service 500 or 500,000 customers, it'd all be an extension for them.


Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[sronan]

It’s the frequency and the knowledge to configure the software and equipment 
that is still prohibitively expensive in many cases.

And frankly, if you are only providing fixed access to 500 users, I’m not sure 
even the AWS solution is necessary. Because if you can configure the transport 
and the software you can probably run a handful of KVM servers.

Shane

> On Jan 25, 2022, at 6:21 AM, Mark Tinka  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 1/25/22 12:50, Bjørn Mork wrote:
>> I don't know what that article says, but cloudification of the mobile
>> core has been a thing for a while.  We have this: https://wgtwo.com/
>> Disclaimer:  I'm working for Telenor and spouse is working for Cisco.
>> WG2 is a joint venture between Cisco, Telenor and Digital Alpha.
> 
> I don't think the model is, in and of itself, new.
> 
> What's new is that it is available from an "everyday", mainstream cloud 
> provider. In essence, democratizing it and making it more accessible to a 
> variety of markets and scales of operation.
> 
> Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/25/22 12:50, Bjørn Mork wrote:


I don't know what that article says, but cloudification of the mobile
core has been a thing for a while.  We have this: https://wgtwo.com/

Disclaimer:  I'm working for Telenor and spouse is working for Cisco.
WG2 is a joint venture between Cisco, Telenor and Digital Alpha.


I don't think the model is, in and of itself, new.

What's new is that it is available from an "everyday", mainstream cloud 
provider. In essence, democratizing it and making it more accessible to 
a variety of markets and scales of operation.


Mark.

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Bjørn Mork]

I don't know what that article says, but cloudification of the mobile
core has been a thing for a while.  We have this: https://wgtwo.com/

Disclaimer:  I'm working for Telenor and spouse is working for Cisco.
WG2 is a joint venture between Cisco, Telenor and Digital Alpha.


Bjørn

Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/19/22 21:52, Michael Thomas wrote:



There was an article in the Economist (sorry if it's paywalled) about 
Dish entering the mobile market using an AWS backend. I don't think 
that AWS brings much more than compute for the most part so I don't 
really get why this would be a huge win. A win maybe, but a huge win? 
I can certainly see that not having tons of legacy and accreted 
inertia is big win, but that's true of any disruptor. In the end they 
still need base stations, spectrum, backhaul and all of that to run 
their network, right?


Am I missing something, or is this mainly hype?

Mike

https://www.economist.com/business/will-the-cloud-business-eat-the-5g-telecoms-industry/21806999 



It's behind a pay wall, so can't read the entire article.

But AFAICT, the way AWS's 5G service works is that they can provide an 
entire solution (towers, backhaul, back-end, even SIM cards), or just 
the back-end.


I believe the latter is called Wavelength:

    https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/features/

I'd say it is a legitimate threat to traditional MNO's. One does not 
require to build a national-scale mobile network from scratch... if you 
can service a small community of some 500 people in a manner that is 
affordable to them, and gives you a nice return so you can buy some food 
at the end of each month, no reason why that is not a successful and 
sustainable model.


Heck, you probably don't even need to offer classic voice and SMS 
services. There are plenty of IP-based apps that will do this for you, 
and I know many people who have totally given up packages that include 
voice minutes and SMS messages, in favour of data-only services from 
their MNO. They are thriving.


So if a small mobile operator using AWS 5G as a back-end does not need 
to negotiate massive interconnect contracts and deals with other telco's 
in the area, and their handful of customers are fine with just Internet 
access as the only service, makes a lot of sense to me.


As I've been saying for a long time now, the telco model is a dying one. 
Customers only care about the problems we can help them solve, not 
whether we are a Tier-1, or how many TV shows were "Brought to you by..."


Mark.