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Kai Hendry wrote: > Forgive my ignorance here, but does all UK traffic get routed through > LINX? I think some is (was?) routed via Manchester. In the early days of transatlantic data exchange IBM had big connectivity to Manchester, and tied up with JANET there. But LINX was huge in comparison as it handles a lot of other peoples transatlantic traffic. Also no doubt some big ISPs have other redundant links to each other, probably via Amsterdam if not in the UK itself. > My colleague argues this is the case in order to make it easier for > intelligence services to spy on your communication... Paranoia. The UK intelligence services can tap the optical fibre where ever it is in the UK fairly easily, and they have fibre all over the place they could run the tap traffic through back to Cheltenham. LINX works because it is cheap. Lots of customers locally get cheap connectivity inside the M25, they wouldn't want to pay extra to link into somewhere in a rural backwater. Once you have some success it also means it is cheapest for ISPs to peer in the same place, so any upstart ISP connects to LINX for peering purposes even if they buy transit elsewhere. > I always assumed the Internet was de-centralised and didn't basically > have a single point of failure. We could lose LINX and a lot of the Internet would work fine. The UK would be stuffed, but the a lot of the rest of the Internet would be okay, or could route around it in time. Probably more noticeable would be the loss of sites hosted in and around LINX (assuming we lose those at the same time). The Internet probably has a lot of significant individual points of failure. The routing robustness that IP can offer doesn't apply when everyone is charging per Mbps for using their connections. LINX tries to be redundant, it is spread across London, if something took out all of LINX (except administrator cock-up) people would probably be more worried about Londoners than the Internet. > Anyway, I now recall from my time in the Docklands that you don't want > to be connected to just one optic cable if you're a ISP. Say I connected > to just "Global Crossing" at PL30 4HZ. They could dictate the price. > Hence the need for peering. Not just about price, what do you do when their network breaks? Data centres usually buy transit from several providers, and try to ensure those providers have independent physical infrastructure. So at the least you want one connection going up the A30 and one down it, for when someone cuts the cable by mistake. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html