[CII] welcome to the public CII

[John Osmon]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 12:58:30PM +0000, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
> 
> 	I occasionally get confused.  Is there a common understanding
> 	of the term "Critical Internet Infrastructure"?

We all get confused at times.  :-) CI *ought* to be pretty obvious, huh?

> 	Or are we all talking past each other?

I think there will be lots of talking past each other at one level or
another.  The layering of modern communications services makes it
inherent in the conversation.

Consider a situation where:
  - Big Telco sells service to smaller provider.
  - Smaller provider sells service to local goverment.
  - Local government considers end service "critical."

Assuming we can all agree that the end service is critical, what pieces
or layers of underlying infrastructure get to have have that designation
as well?  All of the smaller provider?  Or just the individual services
sold by the Big Telco?  If the end service is packet based and the
smaller provider is multi-homed do we have to consider all Big Telco
links used for backhaul critical? 

Some "critical infrastructure" is obvious -- others not so much.
Talking past each other will occur.  The value of this mailing list
will be defined by the number of people served by their view.

One man's network layrer is another man's application layer...