Morning,
I have no idea what's really going on at LLNW, but I thought I'd still share an alternative view on this matter:
My understanding is that LLNW is spending tons of money to upgrade some of their IXP connections to 100GbE in Europe. With that in mind, I'm not that surprised if they wish to get some new income to cover those costs. While content is king, eye balls are kings too. Go figure.
I (in the UK) had the same letter from LLNW yesterday, word for word.
When the peering was established, I had transit providers with strict peering policy (TATA/L3), now I have two with more open policy (HE/KPN). I assume LLNW now sees me via what is for them a peer, and see no financial reason to keep a direct session up.
However I must say that the wording of their letter is appalling. Even if they gave me 30 days notice to change my transit arrangement and did not terminate the session without warning, the tone of this mail is simply wrong. I am pretty sure my transit providers are seeing them via the same exchanges I do, so the traffic did, most likely, not even shift from interface. We did not have any issues of capacity and/or outage, so it is not that this change will save them much in opex costs neither. My peering ports are the same size as my transit ports, so they have gained anything in performance by shifting the traffic (and as I do not congest, did not loose anything neither though)
What it tells me is that they do not care about my business and prefer to force me to pay to reach their network (more than I was previously) via transit ... or pay more but less than transit using their "generous" pay peering offer .. I did not bother asking them what the cost was, my answer is NO. I will prefer to pay my transit provider, at least the extra capacity can be put to other use.
If ever I change back my transit provider to one they do not have favourable agreement with, I will think twice about peering again with them, or I may ask them for some pay peering to reflect their saving (no, I would not I am not that kind of scumbag).
As my traffic volume is clearly noise for them, I am sure they do not care at all. However, large rivers are all made of small streams, and all trees starts as seeds ( I am feeling zen this morning ... 
)
Thomas
I am glad they are spending ton of money to upgrade their infrastructure.. but so am I.
I (in the UK) had the same letter from LLNW yesterday, word for word.
Me too.
However I must say that the wording of their letter is appalling
Agreed.
I am glad they are spending ton of money to upgrade their
infrastructure.. but so am I.
Slightly odd though that they are upgrading their network and then de-peering everybody who takes < 1Gb/s from them.
I don't quite understand why a content DELIVERY network would want to do this.
I'm not sure who's content they deliver but this does not seem like a particularly great way to go about delivering it.
There was a network who commented earlier in the thread that they do 600Mb/s with them, that's not an insignificant level of traffic really, especially coming from a single CDN. I wonder if this not some slightly mis-informed exec at LLNW who thought they found a great way to extract more money to deliver content that they have already been paid to deliver.
Lots of networks upgrade their infrastructure. It means they are doing more traffic, which hopefully means their business is doing well. Very few - in fact, I can't think of a single network - start asking for paid peering just because they are upgrading their ports. Networks either ask for paid peering, or don't, irrespective of their IX upgrade schedule. It is based on whether they think they have power over their peers. I guess we know how LLNW feels now.
The interesting thing to me is the reversal from previous years. Most content providers have issues with eyeball networks saying "pay me for bits". Content networks have historically claimed this is silly of the eyeball networks - including LLNW. Eyeballs get paid by their customers (DSL, cable, whatever) to "reach the Internet". Content networks pay to bring the content right to the eyeball's door. Or so the theory goes.
This move belies that argument LLNW has made themselves in the past. It is not about "your customer pays you, my customer pays me." It is about who can force whom to pay (or not, as most people who have spoken up said they would not pay).
End of day, this doesn't change the way of the world. LLNW is a big network, but compared to the whole Internet, they are relatively small. There will be corner cases like this, and the market will decide who wins & who loses. <insert comment about "except those with monopoly power" or some such>