Hacker News Reader

Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

You’re wrong. If say One Wilshire[1] or one of the very few other carrier hotels in its class abruptly ceased existing the Internet would be wrecked and rebuilding would be a matter of months at the very best. It doesn’t matter how many peers a big telco has when the supermajority of backbone peerings are in a handful of buildings.

[1] https://one-wilshire.com/

View on HN

I used to have a security badge to get in there back in 2003 or so. When I was shown around someone said they could cause a minor recession in 5 minutes with an axe. Also they had me grab a fibre that carried all of Japan’s internet traffic. If you pulled that it would route everything the other way around the world through Europe and the east coast.

I had a long lost picture when they were doing some street construction outside and marked all the buried cables with spray paint. Lines going everywhere…

First off, I'm on the east coast-ish, so I'm not sure how much traffic I get from APAC.

Next off, the their front page says:

> Carrier-Neutral with Access to 200+ Carriers

You're telling me these 200+ carriers have no other POPs?

Going to their "Connectivity" page, they show four trans-Pacific cable that land there:

* https://one-wilshire.com/connectivity/

Meanwhile there are a whole bunch of other trans-Pacific cables landing on the US West Coast:

* https://www.submarinecablemap.com

As someone who lives in Toronto, I certainly worry about how concentrated TORIX is, but even it has three physical locations (IIRC), and most folks connect elsewhere as well from the spelunking I've done in BGP.

So if one of these major carrier hotels does have a problem, I don't doubt that there would be repercussions, but I'm not worried about "the Internet" as a whole.

...maybe. Pretty sure the "wreck" would be local to the region around LA, and maybe a few of the countries on the other end of those lines. The immediate effect of an unexpected outage (e.g. the physical destruction of the building) would probably be a lot of rerouted traffic overwhelming systems "nearby" (in the topology of the Internet) for a few hours. It would not take months to recover even in the absolute worst case.

As a network person who's worked at multiple major global transit networks: lol no.

That building gives me anxiety attacks; just thinking about how vulnerable it is.

Not the whole internet, but a whole country for sure: google "Las Toninas" a beachside town in Argentina. Someone over there frequently steps over the wire and good bye rest of the world

Reply on news.ycombinator.com