At 12:33 10/23/96, Robert Laughlin wrote:
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.
Interesting model: presuming that the "aggregating exchange point" had a sizable backbone and could engage in shortest exit routing, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. Of course, a _single_ exchange point can't meaningfully provide any benefit of shortest exit routing, and would probably be treated as an extremely large volume customer. /John