From: Alan Hannan[SMTP:alan@gi.net]
Pondering many things.
I have certainly been trying my best to gain as complete an understanding
of these 'things' as I possibly can while constructing a backbone, and so
will offer my (hopefully not _too_ clueless) thoughts:
Why is it not in my best interest to talk to
NSPX at a meet point?My thought, conspiratorally, is that larger folks (NSP4) could
care less about talking to NSP3's p% of the net, when there is a
lower cost involved in talking to NSP4's q% of the net,
assuming q >>> p.And yet, I fail to grasp why it is not in their best interest to
still include that group located in p%, NSP3's customers. Perhaps
because they'd rather have the customers?
Perhaps NSP4 believes (likely correctly) that NSP3 will pay NSP4 (or
someone peering with NSP4), to ensure that NSP3 customers can talk to the
(larger set of) customers served by NSP4?
Just because someone has 30% of the internet, they still have an
interest in connecting their 30% of the net to .1% of the net, no?
Or expect the .1% to find a way to them?
Perhaps the geographic cost investment in transit to far-reaching
customers is sufficient. Somehow that doesn't answer the question
for me.
I'm not talking about transit, I don't think it's necessarily in
NSP3's interest to carry NSP4's traffic to NSP1. But NSP3-NSP4 I
can see as beneficial, w/ no dalliance.
Clearly this issue is rooted in economics, involving costs (including the
labor costs involved in maintaining what would be a large number of peering
relationships) as well as the maximization of revenue potential. We have
lost prospective customers because of our lack of NAP peering
relationships, when the customer hadn't the faintest idea what the concept
meant ("asking if we "paired" with anybody). My mental image of the whole
picture is that, if NSP4 is going to accept traffic from a West Coast
customer of NSP3 and haul it to their East Coast customer, they expect to
be able to hand the return traffic back to you on the East Coast, not haul
it to a single peering location in one part of the country. This is not
transit in the sense that it crosses into other networks, yet it certainly
requires the use of national infrastructure.
I'm not sure this answers the question fully for me, either.
-alan
"baring my heart for the wrath of all"
May it bring us all closer to cluefullness... 