|} > the Sherman Act (if memory serves). These types of problems can be quite |} > nasty, involving treble punitive damages.
Unfortunately for Nathan, this above is wrong. There are very real engineering reasons for not peering if someone is at one NAP/MAE. Also since Sprint and MCI do have published policies, if they made exceptions to them they could get sued for discriminating against some competators (not all, makes a big legal difference). So in fact, unless Sprint and MCI want to give away service to all people that connect to the MAEs/NAPs, they MUST have a policy, and MUST abided by it. (And as soon as that happens, I know of a Texas company that will drop lines into MAE-East and force peering with Sprint and MCI, etc., needless to say I don't see that happening, so I will have to build a backbone to three NAPs just like everywhere else.) And there is the issue of actually having peering capacity available. (Not only do some want free service to the carrier's customers, but they want the carrier to replace all of the carrier's routers). I understand that when capacity is available, a number of the carriers would not be adverse to discussing having someone that does not meet the full requirements for peering, PAY to get peering, thus offseting the backbone costs. (This should cost less than full transit since its just inside the carrier's backbone, but this partly depends on the true incremental cost of the paths and prefixes.)
|} Ya, but Sprint has more money then us, and money wins. :-)
More importantly, Sprint (or any "larger" carrier) has content, and customers that YOU (being a "smaller" ISP) want to provide to your customers. Typically the larger folks are happy to get to ISP #1 via their single transit route because there's less load on their routers (being border or otherwise), fewer paths, etc.
-- Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc. jerry@fc.net PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708 | 1-800-968-8750 | 512-339-6094 http://www.fc.net