Re: Provider credibility - does it matter? was Re: Inter-provider relations

[Vadim Antonov <avg () quake net>]

Roger Bohn <Rbohn () UCSD edu> wrote:

At 8:36 PM -0700 10/24/96, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> Note that i didn't even talk about less measurabe, but way too
> more important things like hosting of information suppliers.
> Say, Big Provider connects 1000 web sites; Small Provider hosts
> 1 site -- benefit from peering in terms of Web site diversity to
> the Big Provider's customers is 0.1%.  To Small Provider's
> customers the benefit of peering is 99.9%.

> Oops, this has an arithmetic fallacy.  Assuming that Big Provider also has
> 1000x more customers than Small Provider, and that all 1001 web sites are
> equally attractive, then there are 1000 BP  customers each with a .001
> chance of wanting to surf the SP web site.  Compare this with 1 SP customer
> with a .999 chance of wanting to surf a BP web site, and a .001 chance of
> surfing the SP web site.

No, this is not about mutual traffic -- this is about benefit to
_a_ customer.

Your computation is correct but is completely irrelevant from the
point of view of a customer.  They're interested in reacheability, not
traffic at some exchange point.

I.e. each small ISP's customer derives 99.9% of benefit from the peering,
while large ISP's customer derives only 0.01%.  Hence, the large ISP
can force small ISP to pay up -- without connectivity to a large ISP the
small ISP will be dead pretty soon.  This is exactly like grocery chains
which can (and do) force consumers to pay up for food -- although you
can grow your own tomatoes in your backyard and probably sell them to
those grocery chains.  Good chances are, they're not interested.

--vadim
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