Provider credibility - does it matter? was Re: Inter-provider relations

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1

Any provider that does not recognize the value of bilateral, no-settlement
peering anywhere that its cost-effective for both parties (ie: if you have
traffic destined for me, get it on MY network where I'm being paid to
carry it and let ME figure the rest out!) deserves what they get.

Zero-settlement peerings open to anyone are demonstrably amount to
subsidies from large peers to small.

That already was beaten to death. However, i repeat the argument:

         Big Provider
Customer A ---[POP] ------------- 1000 miles -----------[POP]
                >
               IXP
                >
        Customer B ------[POP]-1 mile-[POP]
               Small Provider

When customers A and B talk Big Provider pays to get them through
1000 miles. Small Provider pays for 1 mile.

Note that i didn't even talk about less measurabe, but way too
more important things like hosting of information suppliers.
Say, Big Provider connects 1000 web sites; Small Provider hosts
1 site -- benefit from peering in terms of Web site diversity to
the Big Provider's customers is 0.1%. To Small Provider's
customers the benefit of peering is 99.9%.

Zero-settlements work only when peers are of comparable size.
Any attempt to extort pressure to force it upon anyone simply
causes large folks to flee.

--vadim

2

We have the same picture there.

If we have 1000 kilimoters back-bone, we include the cost of this
back-bone into our prices, and sell 64K for (for example) 100bokazoids.

If small ISP crinix opens free-of-chsarge peering with us, he must not
include the cost of back-bone into their prices, and they sell 64K for
50 bokazoids.

This mean we can't allow free-of-charge peering with them.

3

Oops, this has an arithmetic fallacy. Assuming that Big Provider also has
1000x more customers than Small Provider, and that all 1001 web sites are
equally attractive, then there are 1000 BP customers each with a .001
chance of wanting to surf the SP web site. Compare this with 1 SP customer
with a .999 chance of wanting to surf a BP web site, and a .001 chance of
surfing the SP web site.

In both directions the average traffic is the same (1 surf per unit time);
SP is getting the same information supply benefit as BP.

Of course this will show up as equal traffic in both directions, so it
would be a wash under settlements. To the extent that one side's sites are
better for surfing (e.g. higher wavers :slight_smile: or has proportionally fewer
customers, traffic will be unequal.

Roger