A Network Crumb Back Story: A Baker's Dozen Retrospective

Summary

SubscribeLoaf and behold, this retrospective covers nearly 20 years of the Baker’s Dozen style annual ranking of the biggest ASes of the internet. In it we discuss the DFZ, de-peerings, and partitions. It was the yeast we could do.For many years, my former colleagues at Renesys (and later Dyn, after we were acquired) would publish an annual ranking of the internet’s top ASes called the “Baker’s Dozen.” This ranking was based on estimated customer cone size as modeled in our products. As with any ranking, this list was often the subject of controversy and debate — everybody wants to be #1. 🙂 Ever since I joined Kentik back in 2020, I have fielded requests to bring back this annual AS rankings post. Now, I’m not ready to commit to that but I thought it might be interesting now to go back to the beginning of this ritual and see how things have evolved over nearly twenty years of ranking the internet’s top ASNs. A lot has changed in the transit market since the first Baker’s Dozen was published in 2008. Over the past two decades, content delivery services have fundamentally changed the way in which internet traffic is delivered to the end-user — reducing reliance on transit. This change, combined with advancements in networking technology, helped to drive wholesale transit prices down, forcing some major networks to cut costs to stay competitive, while others turned their focus to more lucrative ventures. For this post, I compiled 20 years of AS rankings to see what stories they reveal about the transit industry. We even built a nifty interactive visualization that allows a user to track the rankings of individual ASes over this time period. As much of this information has been lost to the passage of time, I had to dig deep into the archives to piece together the snapshots from old Baker’s Dozen posts over the years (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016) — thank you, archive.org! For the years 2021 and on, I used Kentik Market Intelligence, which borrows...