SCION is generally considered snake oil within the network operator community. Its weird single vendor for profit company that ships it's software, the fact that no router hw asic fwding supports what they want to do and then the general scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto as well as some "green washing" for PR hype.

Sure the swiss have their toy but no one is taking it seriously.

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xyquadrat 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm, I'd disagree. The fact that Anapaya Systems (the for profit company mentioned) has the only commercial implementation/adjacent software is a problem, yes. But "snake oil" doesn't quite match up with the fact that SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day [1], so at least some level of workable technology has to be there. And for no one to be taking it seriously, there's a decently long list of multinational ISPs at the very least taking steps towards offering SCION to customers [2] (e.g. British Telecom has expressed enough interest that they have various recent marketing videos on Anapaya's YouTube channel). Finally, I'm not sure what you mean regarding the "scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto" - as someone who has worked on SCION-based projects I never heard anything about this. Apparently a blockchain company invested in Anapaya, but that doesn't really change anything about the protocol itself, does it?

[1] https://www.scion.org/ssfn-scion/ [2] https://www.scion.org/isps/

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pigggg 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think the swiss banking network is really the right thing to point to. Folks measure networks in bps/pps, not financial transactions - nevermind the actual control plane bits (num of prefixes, as paths, etc.). Plus it's all within one country where you have the luxury of being able to directly influence and steer those companies into adopting this.

As for BT - they're just one broadband ISP operating primarily in a single country. I don't see that moving the needle - you're missing CDNs, traditional large scale "tier 1s" and cloud or large hosting networks.

RPKI got to where it is today through community engagement by folks like Job S. and others - hitting the conferences, direct engagement with operators and raising the bar from a software quality and standards perspective - which still continues today. That's how you get the internet to adopt something that is considered the new normal.

As for your ISP list - I know there are networks listed there that aren't running scion in a production capacity (perhaps you can run scion in a virtualized environment on top of them which is different than those companies running it on their production network).

As for the block chain - it was all the Sui stuff.

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tonetegeatinst 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

200billion CHF....how big is that in bandwidth?

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bo0tzz 6 hours ago | parent [-]

2.6 million transactions per day [0], which in ISO 20022 XML format messages works out to (rough guess) 20GB per day for an average of 1.8Mbps...

[0]: https://www.scion.org/ssfn-scion/

	▲	BadBadJellyBean 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So ... nothing. At least in comparison.

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IIRC, UBS used to use IRC (yes, that IRC) as a messaging "backbone", so I'm not sure this really counts as a POC.

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q3k 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day

This is a meaningless benchmark - for a small group of trusted big enterprises with insurance policies and mutually signed contracts you could've just as well used OSPF with zero filters.

The benchmark would be adoption by an actual large number of parties that don't/can't talk to eachother spread across the world. With a large chunk of them being malicious or incompetent to the point of being effectively malicious.

	▲	xyquadrat 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not claiming that this shows SCION can replace the respective parts of the network stack right now, and you're right that at a global scale this is still an unproven technology. But I would argue that a technology needs a certain level of matureness / is not "snake oil" if it is deployed in a heavily regulated and comparatively conservative sector such as banking.