[afnog] Root zone changes may shake up Net in Africa

[Bill Woodcock]

      On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, ALAIN AINA wrote:
    > Yes Africa is mentioned as the poor child where changes to the root zone
    > will :
    > 1- Kill  Anycast nodes as  they won't have enough bandwidth  to carry the
    > root zone

This isn't a worry with respect to the root zone, which is very small, but 
it's a very real problem with the large gTLDs, which now have update 
streams well over a megabit per second.  DNSsec makes that a considerably 
heavier burden.  You can think of it as a threshold...  There's a certain 
amount of DNS resolution traffic that doesn't have to pass over expensive 
international transit circuits, if you have a local server that's 
authoritative for any domain.  However, there's a cost in IXFR traffic to 
keep the local server up-to-date.  If the latter exceeds the former, it's 
not worth doing.  If it's not done, people get poorer quality of service 
locally.  

So it's kind of a vicious circle.  If transit costs are high, and you 
don't have too much DNS traffic, you also wind up getting poor service, 
even though you're paying a high price.

That's nothing new to Africa, of course, but it is a specific case that we 
need to pay attention to and try to mitigate.

                                -Bill