On the contrary, as a decent sized, (not huge, not big, but bigger than
average,
and with a domestic and international footprint), ISP, we would like to
be able to get a
connection to UUNet or the other major carriers simply to get to *their*
networks and
those that pay to connect to them. I can get to many of the smaller
networks through
peering relationships we maintain at NAPs and other avenues as well as
transit
agreements with two major carriers.
We bring both alot of traffic to the table that would like to terminate
on those carriers
networks and connect to a large number of sites with content (the States
of Florida &
New York amongst them). I am willing to pay to connect to a major
carrier, but I don't
want to buy transit. No one I know of, save us, currently offers this.
What I would like to do is to connect to, for example, Sprint *just to
get to folks who
buy from Sprint*, not to transit through them to get to a NAP someplace.
Logically,
this should be available (and we make such arrangements available) at a
lower
cost than transit. At the extreme low end, it is a no-cost relationship
at exchange
points called peering. You suggestion of settlements is not new, in
fact, it was a great fear
about 18 months ago or so. Perhaps this is it re-occurring in the cyclic
nature of the Net.
Should someone want to charge me by the packet, I would make that same
arrangement with them. As a telephone company, we make those reciprocal
agreements all the time (and make money at it). Most of the RBOCs,
however, prefer a
no fee interchange since the traffic is imbalanced and they are on the
loosing end.
Should settlements look to be the model, I would build my network
differently, putting
all inbound traffic on settlement based connections and outbound traffic
on non-settlement
connections. Easy to do.
How can we combat this? By building better interconnectivity amongst
ourselves. Local
exchanges help to offload traffic that we would otherwise hand off to
major NSPs. We are
actively campaigning to build exchanges in any city we can for ISPs to
exchange traffic, removing
it from the NSP backbone.
Bob
