Re: AOL & Cogent

["Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve () telecomplete co uk>]

On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:

> > The perceived "money on the table" frequently doesn't exist and attempts
> > to get it may produce the opposite result.
>
> well, yeah, sure, but...
>
> > * Who they shift the traffic to may be your competitor.
>
> ...at least you know they are paying SOMEBODY, thus supporting the market
> you want to be in.  you can then compete in that market.  if everybody who
> could peer in N places worldwide could just get peering, then all kinds of
> per-bit revenue for "high tier" network owners would turn into per-port
> revenue for exchange point operators.  where's the market in that?  how
> could a "high tier" even exist in those conditions?

Good point about market support..

Well, I think as a local operator you can not expect to be able to peer with
everyone to receive global routes but theres no reason not to exchange local
routes comparable to the area your own network covers, this wont affect transit
sales and wont cost you in backhaul either. Thats a slightly different
perspective than assuming you can get a providers to exchange all their network
with you in a settlement free bilateral.

> > If you assume the above three cases are costs and you add that to the cost
> > of the decreased efficiency of traffic to the target network you can
> > compare it to the probability that you can sell service to the former
> > peer.  Depending on the relationship, you can guess the likelyhood.
>
> well, that's a technical consideration, and as such won't matter until we've
> burned through some of the overcapacity from the dot-bomb era.  right now
> it's possible to do gaming and voip and other isochronous applications via
> a transit provider who can backhaul your traffic 1500 miles (or 6000 miles)
> to some centralised peering point and still have reasonable performance.  we
> will need to 1000X the traffic volume again before this stops working again.

Unfortunately I tend to agree, on the whole the internet is about web pages and
email and that wont suffer from the perspective on the eyeballs..

But, hosters are very conscious about this and will move to the better connected
provider, we've seen this on the CW takeover on Exodus, as Exodus closed peers
the customers abandoned ship...

And definitely to your gamers and possibly your VoIP folks to (depending on
details) they will be very fickle on your network connectivity and the quality
of local peerings is crucial to these applications, gaming is growing very
quickly as more people get flat fee broadband and to a residential access
provider I wouldnt underestimate how much it could hurt to increase the path to
the servers by a couple of hops.


Steve

> which should take about a year.