State of the Internet: Experiences of a State Regional

Bert Rossi

• Stan Barber's Notes
• February 1998 NANOG Home Page

Stan Barber's Notes

MichNet is the non-profit network operated by Merit. It is a membership organization where the members are the 12 4-year institutions in the state of the Michigan. We do have 10% business members.

Most customers are 56kb, but there has been growth in T-1 connections. 50% of the traffic comes from the 12 member universities. The big hub is in Ann Arbor.

Major Issues

• Relentless growth of traffic
  • 80% of the traffic is exiting the network. We are trying to use web caching to help this, but it is does require cooperation of our customers.
  • We are looking into doing peering points at other locations in our network besides Ann Arbor and East Lansing.
  • We installed a second T-3 in August and it is now getting full. Balancing this traffic has been challenging.
• Multihoming
  • There has been a financial incentive to stick with one upstream provider in our network. The traffic-balancing problem will become more complex with more exit points.
  • We are also trying to use the AADS NAP to connect to develop other peering arrangements.
• Security is our third problem.