Re: ratios

[Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 10:53:57AM +0100, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> >   D. The applicant shall take steps to ensure that its routes are not 
> >   announced to Cable & Wireless from another network.
> >
> > What exactly is this supposed to accomplish?
>
> I can only assume it means that CW consider themselves a Tier1 and they
> will only accept routes from other peering only networks ie Tier1. 

I'm still trying to figure out if that's what they mean or not. My first 
interpretation would be that you just have to have a transit provider who 
will let you filter announcements to certain destination. Yeah they would 
have to be a tier 1 or have upstreams who would also honor "don't 
announce", but thats not particularly hard to accomplish.

If you take their statement at face value, that either don't know how to
use localpref, or they don't like path redundancy. If you try to look for
hidden meaning, you come away thinking that they want you to be a tier 1, 
and just couldn't find a better way to state it.

If there is a more reasonable interpretation, I must be missing it, so 
perhaps someone can fill me in.

> This always interests me, the kind of unofficial rules that other networks
> striving for global superiority all seem to adopt. Surely if a group of
> operators agree together that they will run the market and all other
> players will buy from them then that cant be legal.. I guess its all
> slightly too loose tho...

Wasn't the reason all these "big networks" started coming out with actual 
peering policies at all to keep the DOJ from going down that exact road?

> The opposite rule to this from local providers would be that you set
> your BGP route maps to prefer any routes that dont go over a large
> network (CW) .. thereby feeding the other more friendly networks (to
> take another example UU are arguably the largest network and yet they
> will peer with anyone regionally doing a fairly small amount of
> traffic...)

Depending on your ratios, this may or may not be a good thing. But 
honestly, I'd say that the traffic exchanged with CW by the people who 
actually do peer is going down steadily, and it may not be worth your 
trouble at all. With a open peering policy to anyone you can reasonably 
reach, traffic to 3561 is easily 1/10th of traffic to 701.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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