RE: a question about the economics of peering

["Daniel Golding" <dgolding () sockeye com>]

> > Today, I was approached by *unnamed-ethernet-extension-company*. They
> > extend ethernets between several US and UK peering exchanges.
> >
> > While speaking with them today, thier engineer and I got into a
> little bit
> > of a disagreement as to why people peer with each other at
> public exchange
> > points. My belief is that generally speaking, networks meet at public
> > exchange points (such as MAE-*, LINX, AMSIX, AADS, etc) is to exchange
> > traffic with each other more economically (read: save money).
> >
> > His belief is that people will pay a premium to get to an
> exchange point,
> > because it's worth paying a premium to have 'less hops' between two
> > networks.
>
> The problem with this idea is that public exchange points need
> to be *avoided* when they get too congested.  People may start
> out trying to minimize number of hops, but I think they eventually
> try to minimize total latency.

Hmm. Congested public exchange points were a reality at some point in the
past. They are now a recurrent myth, thanks to the demise of FDDI EPs and
the rise of GigE EPs. There is little congestion, at this point. Of course,
this could be because most Internet traffic is exchanged over private
peering.

I think that most clued folks are largely uninterested in hop-count. Latency
is much more important.

- Daniel Golding


> > Essentially, he said that paying more for peering that for transit is
> > typical, and to be expected, and most people accept this.
> >
> > Whats the common opinion on this?