“Ciara Ryan, a partner in the bandwidth team at global consulting firm Andersen, agrees. Ryan explains the lack of visibility is due in part to mergers and acquisitions creating carriers that are an amalgam of many parts. The information pertaining to these assets has been integrated poorly, making it difficult to employ risk-management tactics, she says.“Ryan says carriers must be able to extrapolate key bits of information from their databases to manage their network assets properly. This would include, how much they have sold on a particular route, from which point of presence (PoP) it was sold, what the service level agreement (SLA) entailed, whether an option was sold on the contract, whether a contract was a short-term lease or indefeasible rights of use (IRU) agreement and what the definite and projected sales include on particular routes.
“”Very, very few of them would be able to give you this information,” Ryan adds.”
And that’s before considering paths all the way from the carrier’s customer to its customers. If the carriers don’t even know what their own networks consist of, it would appear they can’t be expected to provide a holistic and synoptic view of the Internet, neither one by one or all together.
-jsq