At 11:01 AM 12/03/2001 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >The full text is at >http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/WhatYouWant.asp?NT=185 > >Note that no signatories have signed, and it requires at least 5 to >sign before going into force. > >This is interesting because basically all of Western Europe's IP >traffic crosses the U.S. at some point, and therefore creates some >interesting ramifications for U.S. ISPs.... how do they respond to >demands for subscriber records and copies of traffic?
The latter's not really true - it's a big performance and cost win not to have to cross the pond twice, and reality has caught up with this sufficiently that even annoying PTT pricing and policies no longer force this. There are some really large internet exchanges in Europe - I think Linx in London handles about 12Gbps of capacity, and AMSIX in Amersterdam does pretty well. There are lots of smaller peering points as well, though I don't know volumes. (To give you some scale on this, AT&T has about 35-40Gbps of peering with other Tier 1 ISPs, and we're probably second or third largest in the US now. I've long since lost track of how much capacity the MAEs and NAPs have. US Tier 1 ISPs try to handle 90-95% of their traffic by private peering rather than the public peering points. European ISPs may be different - pricing and distances are different, and US ISPs spent several years in a race with the NAPs between traffic and capacity / equipment performance.) Of course, Real Soon Now you'll be able to run your fiber connection through Havenco to get your packets laundered :-) > Asia Most of the big internet capacity leaving Asian countries and Australia/NZ heads to San Francisco or LA, with some going to Japan. There's some other inter-Asian capacity (mainly Singapore to Hong Kong and Australia, and SG feeding SouthEast Asia and India) but the big bits are coming here, though there's starting to be a lot of inter-Asia growth. The SG-India connections are important - VSNL's telecom monopoly incompetence seriously inhibits connectivity within India, and SG's the nearest high-tech place to run a private line to so you can do voice or data services. They're supposed to gradually lose their monopoly status soon, and maybe the electric power companies will succeed in deploying real bandwidth at reasonable prices without losing out to bureaukleptocracy. In a later message, Mike added > OUTBOUND traffic is what I meant, of course :) Oh, definitely. Other than traffic leaving Europe for the Middle East or South Africa, and a small amount heading along Flag or SeaMeWe to India and East Asia, and a small amount to the Caribbean or Latin America, almost everything leaving Europe goes to the US. Latin America has some West Coast connectivity, but the main cables connect from Miami to the Caribbean and East Coast, and a large fraction of the telecom services for the region are provided from Miami rather than inter-LatinAmerica.
