Won't this just increase the distance and AS count for Exodus outbound traffic,
making Exodus hosting even less desirable?
Only in the minds of people who are lied to by Exodus's detractors.
I just spoke with the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace, and it
signed (in BSL, so the translation may be off) the following:
Usage-based billing: less performance -> less traffic -> lower bill.
C&W surely does not want to present a lower bill to you, and
thus may be motivated to figure out and correct what's going on.
Exodus's customers moving less traffic could take a (hypothetical!)
smaller bill to mean unpopular/stale content, or poor performance,
possibly near the end user, possibly near the on-Exodus source; if
the latter is suspected, distribute the content to elsewhere.
(If the former, tell all the politicos you can to stop protecting
local-loop monopolists!)
A (hypothetical!) larger bill could likewise be taken as
either increasingly popular content, or as better performance.
A _correlation_ with a change in Exodus's routing policy is
not the only possible cause -- someone elsewhere may have done
something to widen an intermediate bottleneck.
Remember that the AS path is only a trail of breadcrumbs used
to avoid route-announcement loops. It is NOT a reliable indicator
of the forwarding path towards the destination. An AS-to-AS "adjacency"
within an AS path *may* be completely meaningless. You can draw
no conclusions about performance (in terms of loss, delay, and
delay variance) by examining an AS path, although someone might
prove that for a given snapshot, from a given test location, there
are strong correlations.
Likewise, while from one particular vantage point, a "broader" peering
policy correlates with better performance (in terms of things which
actually affect goodput, namely loss/delay/delay variance), from other
vantage points, there is an opposite correlation. This is not anything
remotely like a proof that strict routing and forwarding hierarchy
leads to better performance than relaxed routing and forwarding
hierarchy, with respect to how traffic is attracted towards a given
destination. (Note that one can have strict routing hierarchy,
yet still observe a relaxed forwarding hierarchy: consider the
case where people do not next-hop-self at LAN-style exchange points).
Therefore, anyone predicting that the sky is falling, and big chunks
are gonna hit Exodus's customers and C&W (or predicting something opposite)
would be lying if he or she claimed to have a better view of the
future of this peering policy change than the average employee of
the psychic friends network.
Sean.