What, providers not wanting to toast their backbone? When you are
connected to every major exchange and have a huge DS3 network, it cost
big bucks. We are building a small network and will be spending about
$250K a month on telco. Why should someone be able to just pay MFS $5700 a
month and make everybody transit bandwidth to him at just MAE-East?
Perhaps the total amount of traffic the small guy exchanges with
the rest of the Internet is that many times less than, say, MCI's
traffic? No?
I do see you point. You forgot to mention the other side. Why
should a small ISP who carries, say, less than 5 GB of traffic
a day, be forced to spend several million dollars a year to
get optimum traffic patterns? I can see him making the choice
of $20K/mo in order to be at a nearby exchange instead of
$2k/mo for a T1 to a transit provider. Not $200K/mo.
It is asymmetrical, but say you are hosting a lot of www sites and have
mostly out-going traffic this solution will work and give you 10, or even
100 meg FDDI out, but only the size of your transit pipe in.The main problem with is is that A) It is not ethical B) the provider
you are doing this to will figure it out someday and see you in court C)
it is not nice.
Allow me to ignore A and C, but I can see the small guy making the
following argument in court:
Why should I pay transit provider X in order to send
web contents to big guy Y's customers when Y is directly
connected at an exchange?
Seriously, if these issues are not resolved within the ISP
community it won't be too long before courts force the issues
like they did for domain name ownership.
Sanjay.