Re: peering charges?

[Dirk Harms-Merbitz <dirk () power net>]

On Mon, 27 Jan 1997, Deepak Jain wrote:

> > That was my point. Why charge a higher _recurring_ fee for a faster
> > connection?
>
> Because (usually) there is a higher recurring potential traffic load from 
> your site. What if you run one of the big Olympic or Superbowl web sites? 
> And you get charged $1000 per month whether you have a 155Mbit connection 
> or a 56Kbaud connection. Two months out of the year you could fill it, 
> and the other 10 do nothing but send some email. The network you connect 
> to has to be engineered for those peaks or they are not doing their job 
> [IMO]. 
>
> Granted, we usually talk about mid day peaks, etc, but what about 
> convention halls that might keep a T3 or two around for big trade shows 
> and only *really* use them on the weekends or weeknights or something. 
> Their total (average, or even byte) traffic might not be that 
> significant, but their bursts could be wildly high.
>
> -Deepak.

Exactly. Current telco pricing (and engineering) focusses on _potential_
to transfer data. Like I said, this makes sense for circuit switched
networks. The problem is that e are now dealing with packet networks. 
where there is little to no cost in having a wire plugged into your
network that is not transferring packets

In other words, applying circuit switching based thinking to data networks
creates the wrong incentives for network operators since it may be cheaper
to fire the top ten users of my network rather then increasing capacity.
If you count bytes transitting your network then the incentive is to
increase capacity.

Dirk

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