all of this pseudo-marketing is enough to make my head spin.
the practice of limiting peering agreements has nothing to do
with collusion and we all damn well know it. enough of us
have been around long enough to know that to draw simple
comparisons between the phone business and the internet business
is foolish, if not dangerous. settlements, as they exist in the
phone industry do not make sense for the internet industry.
there may be a way for internet networks to settle on traffic
imbalances but i haven't heard a decent one proposed. do we assume
that all traffic is web traffic (pull model)? and if that changes?
what about multicast traffic (push model sometimes, pull model others)?
who derives benefit, and who should pay?
sure, mci has a good reason to connect to bell atlantic and all of the
LOCAL carriers in the telephone business. their customers are
potentially our customers for long distance traffic. we can BILL them.
if MCI the phone company decided not to offer its long distance to a
certain company's local customers, i would expect that the feds would
be all over us/them.
if internetMCI decides that we should or should not peer with
another network the decision is made purely on traffic flows.
if coast to coast traffic moves over our network twice between
ourselves and the peer, that's not a peer. if the peer has a
number of nap connections and a ds3 ld packet network, that's a peer.
the practice that you refer to as 'unwise' keeps us from losing
our shirts in an already-too-competitive marketplace. how, you
ask? by forcing mci to continually buy bandwidth from ixc's.
and the bandwidth is only half the battle, unless the ixc's start
offering higher speed pipes, the engineering to keep so many connections
going to a single ixc will become very costly. working
without such a policy would be the equivalent of allowing a small
start-up local phone company to demand and get free long distance
for all of it's subscribers from mci. i have no way of billing
anyone elses customers, there is no dileniation of service between
local and long distance internet so we're left with the 'you move
half the packets and i'll move half the packets' model.
the end of your post is interesting, however. it may come to the
point where larger carriers are forced to tag local as's local and
to peer on the 'local' basis. but what benefit for that added
complexity? local networks would still need to buy transit from
someone.
Jeff Young
young@mci.net