Lightning Talk: BGP on the edge: making the internet withstand extreme weather events.

Flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and other severe weather/environmental events can dramatically impact our ability to deliver IP based communications to end …

Flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and other severe weather/environmental events can dramatically impact our ability to deliver IP based communications to end users, which can include emergency services. While the primary use of BGP is interconnection of ISP’s, enterprise and government network users can also benefit from the ability to deploy BGP on the edge for multi-homing and redundancy purposes. A many-pathed network becomes significantly more robust for every participant. Direct carrier participation in paid, filtered peering arrangements can contribute to the solution, as can IXP based encrypted tunnel endpoints providing BGP sessions to the edge. With the increase in severe weather events effecting more and larger service areas, additional effort is required to ensure that our networks don’t fail as a result of a more hostile, changing climate, just as packet switching ensured continued communications between key facilities in the event of nuclear attack.