Numerous videos and quizzes about routing and BGP among other tropics.
NSRC training resources: https://learn.nsrc.org/
I don’t think all will be familiar with what BGP is. For the ones curious, it one of the “languages” (protocols) spoken by the large computers that make up internet connections possible.
It’s a highly technical subject, and it requires some background on computer networks before digging into that.
Non-technical: BGP an analogy
Basically when you sign up to your telecom operator they are kind of their own island within the internet and in order to communicate with the other islands (other telcom companies).
The internet can be summed up as sending messages from any point to any other point on earth. For the sake of the analogy, you can think of these messages as physical envelopes with the destination address.
So, back to the islands, the island you are on doesn’t much in it and you want to talk to your friends who live on other islands and visit websites who are also not hosted on the same one as yours.
Obviously your island telecommunications provider wants that to be possible, so it starts establishing contracts with other island’s providers in order to exchange exchange inter-island messages.
If some service from other island offers lower prices, then your message goes though that island first because it’s cheaper than to go directly (like we do with stops and flights).
Question: does this analogy make sense to you? (feedback via private message is appreciated)
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Quoting @vasilis:
This video explains it quite nicely: https://learn.nsrc.org/bgp/internet_routing
If some service from other island offers lower prices, then your message goes though that island first because it’s cheaper than to go directly (like we do with stops and flights).
Routing policies between ISPs differ and do not always make sense.
For data to travel from a country to another it may be cheaper to use a transatlantic route than route via the countries in between.Many concerns arise from big peers as they are a very good target for surveillance and data collection by the foreign and international authorities. DE-CIX one of the biggest IXPs in Europe filled a lawsuit against the federal republic of Germany:
https://de-cix.net/en/about-de-cix/media-center/press-releases/information-on-the-lawsuit-against-the-federal-republic-of-germany
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