This is not directly related to MICE, but I suspect it will be of interest to many of you, so I figured I would share it anyway;
Within the last week or two it appears that as part of the Level3/CenturyLink merger they have interconnected their two IP networks here in the Twin Cities. That is AS209(Centurylink) and AS3356(Level3) appear to have interconnected a pair of routers here in the Twin Cities. However, the interconnection doesn't seem appear in the BGP routing tables we are receiving as a customer of Level3. From that perspective the closest interconnection appears to be in Chicago like it has always been. However, based on traceroutes there appears to be more specific routes being exchanged here in the Twin Cities that are not being announced to us as BGP customer of Level3.
Further, the interconnection doesn't seem to include local Twin Cites BGP customer of Centurylink or any Centurylink outstate Minnesota customers at all, as those destinations seem to route through the Chicago still. So this primarily provides a shortcut from Level3 Twin Cities customers to Centurylink's Twin Cities broadband customers and vice vesra. This has reduced our latency to Twin Cities Centurylink broadband customers; for fiber customers from ~20ms to ~5ms or less, and DSL customers from ~40ms to ~25ms, most of remaining latency being from DSL interleaving.
So, if you are a BGP customer of Level3 here in the Twin Cites at least, you may want to ensure that you are routing to Centurylink through Level3, to take advantage of this shortcut.
Thanks.
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David Farmer
Email:[log in to unmask]Networking & Telecommunication Services
Office of Information Technology
University of Minnesota
2218 University Ave SE Phone: 612-626-0815
Minneapolis, MN 55414-3029 Cell: 612-812-9952
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