Re: peering charges?

[Vadim Antonov <avg () pluris com>]

Dirk Harms-Merbitz <dirk () power net> wrote:

> The big problem is the current incentive to cripple network connections.

The incentive to reduce quality down to the minimal level accepted by
the target customer base is the prominent feature of any market.

> Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same
> amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the
> one-time cost of buying interface electronics?

Because there is a real cost for long-haul packet transport.

Why people pay higher rent for houses than for studio apartments?

"Connection costs" is rent on transmission facilities, plus
overhead (upkeep of the property, insurance, administration, etc).

> Many real-time problems with packet switching (out of order arrival of
> packets, need to re-order packets) essentially go away when speed
> increases, i.e. things move out of perceptible ranges into in-perceptible
> time variations.

That does not parse.  Internet as is does not reorder packets.

Increasing speed does not change anything in this respect.  It only
shrinks time scale.

And, i never suspected that reordering is a problem in real-time world.
0.5 sec variance (a lot!) with 1.5Mbps MPEG-2 video stream (better-than
cable TV quality) requires stunning 100 kilobytes worth of buffers.

The only reason reordering is a problem is because TCP has no reasonable
selective ACKs (the existing SACK options are close to useless), so
kludges like VJ's fast retransmit are necessary on high delay-bandwidth
networks.

> Settlement based on whoever takes more traffic would be nice.

Would you please describe any useful mechanism of traffic-based
inter-backbone settelemts?

> It gives a very direct incentive to build better networks.

Nah.  It is like saying that "usage-based" pricing at McDonalds
gives a very direct incentive to sell something better resembling food.

> Lets say MAE's
> and NAP's are run in a cost-recovery mode and my only monthly cost as a
> network is the cost of my circuits, i.e. having a connection to the
> MAE/NAP.

They do it now.

> As soon as my network takes more traffic than my circuit costs
> I'm making money.

I assume "my network takes more traffic" means "there are more packets
(bytes, etc) going into my network", right?

So, you want to charge others for your customers browsing their customer's
servers?

> Money that can be used directly to build a better
> network which will take even more traffic, i.e. generate more money. In a
> sense, this would provide best case capitalism with routers deciding from
> whom to buy.

I love it.  Do you really think you discovered a fount of money?  Any settlement
game is zero-sum by definition.  When ISP A pays ISP B some sum, A has
less resources to invest into infrastructure.  On average, customers
do not win.

> All energy would go into building better networks... neither
> advertising, nor salespeople are necessary in this scenario!

Ah, i'd like to live in that world of yours.

--vadim
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