RE: C&W Peering Problem?

["Vivien M." <vivienm () dyndns org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog () merit edu [mailto:owner-nanog () merit edu]On Behalf Of
> Sean Donelan
> Sent: June 1, 2001 10:28 PM
> To: nanog () merit edu
> Subject: RE: C&W Peering Problem?
>
> If the customer pays flat-rate, you collect the same amount of money no
> matter how little traffic they send or receive.  The 95% charging
> used by some providers is the greater of *either* inbound or outbound
> traffic.  So imbalanced traffic to or from your customers is paid by your
> customers.

I know this was beaten to death a few threads ago, but there are ISPs (eg:
one of ours) that bill 95th percentile on the TOTAL of inbound and outbound.

> So, can anyone explain why C&W, UUNET or Genuity care about traffic
> balance, other than to limit competition by providers who are better
> at attracting particular types of customers than them?  If you are good
> at being a webhoster, your traffic will have one profile.  If you are
> good at being an access provider, your traffic will have another profile.

The real reason is probably $$$ plain and simple, but...

My understanding, based on talking to some people who run networks like
@Home which are totally access providers, is that the theory they use it
this. Let's say you have network A, a big access network, and network H, a
hosting network.
If the two networks peer in San Jose, Dallas, Chicago, New York, and
Washington, DC, and network H's biggest data centers are in San Jose but
network A's biggest customer base is in New York, that means that network H
sends lots of traffic through the San Jose peering link, and then network A
needs to carry tons of traffic on their backbone all the way to New York.
Meanwhile, network A sends acks and similar things to network H, and a
majority of those go through the New York peering link, and are then taken
back to San Jose on network H. The problem, the way network A sees it, is
that they might need to get an OC48 between San Jose and New York, whereas
network H can get away with an OC3/OC12 on the same path.
Thus, network A finds it unjust that they have to pay all this money for
this OC48 when network H, which is the network sending them all this
traffic, can get away with a much cheaper circuit, and thus they use this
excuse to try and bill network H in order to make as much money as possible.
Thus the "free ride" argument..

If traffic is balanced, then I guess each side feels like they're using
equivalent amounts of the other's network, and thus that it cancels out...
(of course, in a real life implementation, this is presumably significantly
more complicated, and I think at that point the logic vanishes in favour of
simple greed)

Vivien

--
Vivien M.
vivienm () dyndns org
Assistant System Administrator
Dynamic DNS Network Services
http://www.dyndns.org/