> I believe you, but the problems seem to be confined to N America.
These days it has less to do with geography than where the ISPs meet
up with the meetpoints are. And those are constantly changing. I would
love to give you a specific example, of which I'm rather proud of, but
I can't. But I'll illustrate by proxy:
Let's say that there is a cable tv company in some obscure coastal
city in Spain that provides high-speed internet to their customers.
The headquarters for this company may be located in Barcelona. That's
where the main servers and routers are located for that company. They
have two connections to the outside world. One to London, another to
Frankfurt. That's where they meet up with the "Tier-1" carriers. The
Tier-1 carriers connect to the Facebook datacenter in Europe with a
secondary connection to New Jersey.
However, the person living there in that obscure coastal community may
have a cellphone through a major company. That company has their
primary router farms in London and Paris. Oh, and in New Jersey,
Virginia and Miami. This company, has established direct connections
with not only the Tier-1 carriers, but with some of the content
providers directly. Including Facebook. However, due to the fact that
this company is international and has edge routers in multiple
countries and continents, it has connections to Facebook not only in
Europe, but in a couple of places in the USA too.
So, what happens is that where you see a normal geographical tree
structure in a traceroute, (local hick town to bigger city to big city
to Tier-1 carrier to another big city then to Facebook), you end up
seeing the route as being on your own provider's network direct to
Facebook. This connection can be local or it can be countries away.
Where your internet connection to the content provider is usually
geography-centric, it isn't always so. I know that in our case, we
literally traverse an entire continent (almost 4000 fiber miles) in
order to avoid meeting the content providers in the pac-nw. (along
with, of course). So when the content provider in question has a major
issue in Seattle, we avoid the problem by directing the traffic to one
of the data centers on the other side of the country. Serious
companies, like ours, hit the meet points at three or four
geographically diverse (not just minimum diversity, but different
quadrants of the country diverse) locations. This means that you can't
just say that the problem is affecting xyz portion of the country. The
problem can be quite international. I've seen hickups when something
weird happens in Dubai.
AG Schnozz
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