As one who is living this senerio on a daily basis, I can tell you it's frustrating and upsetting. We have gone so far as to test the legality of what is happening (there *must* be someone we can sue <grin>). Public peering works well these days as the large networks move their traffic off the NAPs, freeing up bandwidth for the mid to smaller networks. The model that makes sense to me, is for the largest networks to exchange traffic through private interconnects, and for them to treat the aggregated NAP traffic as another large ISP. The NAP is then used for the 2nd tier and smaller providers to exchange traffic with each other, as well as a collection point to gather up traffic for the large networks. Unfortunately, at least so far, the first tier providers are not supporting this approach, forcing me and others I assume, to purchase connectivity. Best Regards, Robert Laughlin ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- DataXchange sales: 800-863-1550 http://www.dx.net Network Operations Center: 703-903-7412 -or- 888-903-7412 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Rod Nayfield wrote:
Gordon - You're describing the dilemma of any newcomers to the net: Assuming that the new net can get peering agreements at the public ix's (this in itself is not easily assumed) there is still an uphill battle.
. If you don't have private interconnects, your traffic goes over the 90% avg. utilized links between the IX point and the large provider's backbone. This makes it difficult to get and keep customers - after all, 75% of the internet is lossy/slow to them, and if they switch to any of the larger providers they don't see that loss.
. You can't get a private interconnect with another provider unless you have the traffic (customers) to justify it. See previous point as to why you can't get the customers.
Interesting points.
Rod