______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT SIG: IX Date: Thursday 2 March 2006 Time: 4.00pm Presentation: NetNod update Presenter: Kurt E Lindqvist ______________________________________________________________________ CHE-HOO CHENG: Next speaker is Kurtis from Netnod. KURT LINDQVIST: I'm from Netnod, the oldest exchange in Europe. Netnod was formed as a separate company in 1996, 1997 in December '96. This year will be our 10-year anniversary. It was basically there was a need or a desire to have an independent and resilient exchange point infrastructure and to have some form of a single national exchange of traffic. The reason for this was around the time Netnod was created, there was an influence by the view of national security, or national infrastructure and security. The design was heavily influenced by this and the design choices under the way Netnod is instructed and set-up is to handle traffic exchange between operators. And it was also decided in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. We thought we'd be able to exchange traffic and have enough capacity to exchange traffic. The latter is probably true for us but not carriers connecting to us but that's kind of not our problem. At the time of creation, a search for a suitable location turned out to be a lot more complex. The criteria for doing the split with the number of exchange points was that the cities needed to have some sort of noticeable population and traffic volume and none of Stockholm had this. There had to be some easy way to get carriers basically transport capacity into those cities. That turned out to be one of the hardest criteria to meet. It doesn't necessarily mean the capacity goes into the ground by itself, especially not in 1996. The last criteria was the exchange points were fairly spread out right across the country. So that we could make some use of localising traffic flows. I'll get back to that later. The last criteria was the Swedish Government had already owned a number of telecommunication bunkers, constructed 40 metres below ground, they are of civilian use and they are used. These bunkers are heavily subsidised and again based on the principle of national infrastructure. Whatever goes in there has to be considered national critical infrastructure, which basically means the voice exchanges, it means us and basically subscribed to databases and generally the stuff that goes into these bunkers. Here is a map of Sweden. Operating in five cities. The northern most, the only one that is located in one of those bunkers. You can save the geography lesson. There was a fairly evenly spread out across the country and the original idea was to localise traffic. Sweden is a fairly long country by European standards and we wanted to keep the response times down so there would be a more favourite exchange of traffic. In the beginning this turned out to be quite hard because most providers, whether we had two locations in Stockholm and Gothenburg, all the exchanges were in Stockholm. People ask me why and I wish I knew the answer. I don't know. This slowly improved today, we will see the traffic is exchanged locally and the largest growth we see is the local exchanges, both in terms of providers and volume. Stockholm is still the largest in terms of absolute numbers but the growth happens outside Stockholm. The reason is the uptake of broadband connections are so large that people don't want to back up, they want to - I would guess - dump it locally and do hot potato routing. But it's most likely also benefit, the peer traffic will pick the shortest path. Something about the connecting service due to reconstruction with these bunkers, these are undisclosed, so it's hard to find a fibre in there. Instead, when you pay the connection fee to Stockholm, we will get you the fibres from your regular, whoever it might be. We will include fibres from there to the two bunkers in Stockholm. As most of the international providers in Sweden are only present in Stockholm, we increase the resilience behind two independent switches in Stockholm, so when you connect to us, you'll have one fibre repair from your location to each of the bunkers. The switches in the bunkers are multi-connected. That's for a reason. This is built for resilience. We don't want traffic in one switch to take out the network, that's the idea, right, Mike? I often, when I do this, there is - I wish you didn't have to do - there are, you really want to keep it as little as you possibly can. You do this basically for resilience. We happen to be the switch vendor's most boring customer. If they can forward packets between the ports, we're happy. That's a challenge for us. In the other - the fibre switcher situation is quite complex. We will help the ISPs find a fibre provider. Just like the switches in Stockholm are not interconnected, they're completely independent of each other. The bunker looks like this. It's a bunker. This actually is below sea level. It's under water. Besides doing this - it was decided at the time of creation we would do it around some critical common infrastructure for the good of the Internet in general and for the good of the Swedish Internet in particular. So we actually provide official Swedish time. This is time that is retraceable. If your interest happens to be time, it is quite unique. It is a requirement for telco networks that all time synchronisation is traceable. You look forward to your standards and you're probably quite vulnerable for attacks. We provide this - and we also run the i.root-servers. In Sweden, we currently operate from, it doesn't really matter, by looking at your router. But in theory you can actually operate this from any location. We also have a number of TLDs. We run the number of TLDs equipment in Stockholm, around Germany as well, and whatever. There's quite a few of them. And we run some local services. There is a bandwidth tool provided by the government in Sweden. You can download this tool and users can measure their available bandwidth. There used to be a broadband provider that claimed the customers got, let's say, too many connections, and probably had 2-meg connections. And they had 512 or something else. It has given, it has given the operators at least some motivating incentive to actually provide what they're selling. What is happening - the latest development happened today. We are putting up each of these measurement services today. We're doing this in all cities. Number of customers - most in Stockholm, 36, and mix of Swedish and international carriers. A maximum here - the peak load in 5-minute samples, it's not the average sample rate. We're doing some 40-gig of traffic. 5-minutes in total. This is for all the five cities. For Stockholm only, it was a maximum around 27-27.5 gig and the rest is equally distributed between Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo. STEPHEN BAXTER: What's the price of the fibre connection? KURT LINDQVIST: The price you pay includes the fibres. STEPHEN BAXTER: What would that be? KURT LINDQVIST: The way we pay the fibre is 209,000 kronors. It is 340,000 kronors. Per year. You pay annually. LOUIS LEE: How well protected are the fibres protected outside the provider? KURT LINDQVIST: Outside there is, in the other cities there is only one switch. In Stockholm we make sure the fibres are redundantly routed. It is pretty obvious that the bunker outlasts the actual carriers and from the end-users by far in case of real trouble. But we do go through some length in making sure the fibres are redundantly routed. That was the connection price, not the fibre price. BILL WOODCOCK: That includes both ports? KURT LINDQVIST: Both ports. CHE-HOO CHENG: Thank you.