[Outages-discussion] Internet "backbone"

[Jimmy Hess]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Joseph Jackson
<jjackson at aninetworks.net> wrote:
> backbone?  This isn't the NSFnet anymore with a few long haul links between
> sites.  When someone says Internet Backbone what are they trying to describe
> since such a physical infrastructure doesn't really exist anymore.

It's true it's not NSFnet anymore,  but there still are some _much_
higher capacity networks
that are utilized for the greatest amount of traffic   from point A to
point B,  and enough of those
had an outage, the multitude of POPs and other interconnections simply
would not come close to replacing them.

What do you suppose the internet starts to look like when you consider
only connections between networks and POPs where the connections have
100 gigabits/s or greater worth of aggregate connectivity?

Despite all the capacity and connection points, the network still has
some logically  tree-like characteristics.

Inter-domain routing is specifically tree like.... with a small number
of central  "Tier 1" networks   that form a logical backbone of the AS
graph.

--
-JH