Re: Peering versus Transit

[Nathan Stratton <nathan () netrail net>]

On Sun, 29 Sep 1996, Sanjay Dani wrote:

> I do see you point. You forgot to mention the other side. Why
> should a small ISP who carries, say, less than 5 GB of traffic
> a day, be forced to spend several million dollars a year to
> get optimum traffic patterns? I can see him making the choice
> of $20K/mo in order to be at a nearby exchange instead of
> $2k/mo for a T1 to a transit provider. Not $200K/mo.

So you are saying that all ISPs should transit the data to just 1 NAP? No
way on earth I would transit data to one NAP for a provider that did not
have plans to spend the big bucks and connect to all. There is no free
ride, you pay for transit you need or pay to build a backbone.

> > It is asymmetrical, but say you are hosting a lot of www sites and have
> > mostly out-going traffic this solution will work and give you 10, or even
> > 100 meg FDDI out, but only the size of your transit pipe in. 
> >
> > The main problem with is is that A) It is not ethical B) the provider
> > you are doing this to will figure it out someday and see you in court C)
> > it is not nice. :-)
>
> Allow me to ignore A and C, but I can see the small guy making the
> following argument in court:
>
>       Why should I pay transit provider X in order to send
>       web contents to big guy Y's customers when Y is directly
>       connected at an exchange?
>
> Seriously, if these issues are not resolved within the ISP
> community it won't be too long before courts force the issues
> like they did for domain name ownership.

No prob, I know of no court that would not rule in the NSP favor. The
small ISP at one NAP can not justify steeling bandwidth because he wants
nice routing.

Nathan Stratton           CEO, NetRail, Inc.    Tracking the future today!
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