The 512K 'Crisis' Makes Its Mark

Many network engineers had to scramble recently to keep their Internet customers connected, after a sudden growth spurt made the Web too complex for some older gear to handle. The moment came when Verizon Communications added many new routes to a dataset called the Border Gateway Protocol routing table.

That Internet address book has for years been approaching the point where it exceeds the capacity of many older routers. The carrier happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back when a routine maintenance procedure caused its network to spit out a less efficient dataset, according to Verizon's network planning executive, Ed Chan. The company consolidated its routes back into a smaller list within minutes, pushing the size of the database back below the red zone, but the spike had already caused ripples in the Internet's fabric.