Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement

[John Curran <jcurran () bbnplanet com>]

At 08:19 PM 08/24/1998 -0400, Alec H. Peterson wrote:
> John Curran wrote:
> > Customers who receive traffic currently bear some of the costs
> > and the sending customer bears some of the costs.  In the case
> > of an off-net sender with shortest-exit routing and no offsetting
> > traffic in the other direction, the receiving customer ends up
> > bearing all of the costs.
>
> I guess 'all the cost' means most of the cost, and 'no offsetting traffic'
> means 'not much offsetting traffic'.

(yes)


> However, is the real problem here the traffic assymetry, or the fact that
> all of the traffic is coming from one geographic location?

Traffic Assymetry of traffic which requires (for lack of better term)
"transport" to the destination.  In the case of longest-exit routing,
the traffic received doesn't require much transit, nor in the case of
distributed content.

> If it is the former, then there isn't much of a solution except to merge
> with a network that sucks a huge amount of traffic. 

Presuming shortest-exit, correct.

> However, if it is the latter, then wouldn't content distribution fix it?  
> I know many web farms
> offer distributed servers to their customers as a type of premium service. 
> However, since in this case it benefits all parties involved, it seems to me
> that it might make sense to offer this service to huge web sites at little
> or no additional cost.

It's difficult to "know" whether the distribution is actually
working and resulting in interconnecti traffic which is local,
but otherwise, yes.

/John