On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Mark Tinka <mtinka@globaltransit.net> wrote:
On Friday, December 16, 2011 05:02:33 AM Joe Malcolm wrote:
Once upon a time, UUNET did the opposite by setting origin to unknown for peer routes, in an attempt to prefer customer routes over peer routes. We moved to local preference shortly thereafter as it became clear this was "changing" the routes in some meaningful way; if a customer was multihomed to us and another provider, this might affect path selection.
This raises an interesting question we've dealt with many a time in our network - outside of situations mandated by governments or some such, are ISP's happy to peer with their customers (where "peer" = settlement-free exchanging of routes/traffic across public interconnects while "customers" = servicing a commercial IP Transit contract)?
Mark.
I've been able to negotiate peering+transit relationships with providers, but only by threat of total revenue loss; ie "we currently pay you $x million/year; we want your on-net routes as settlement-free routes, and will continue to pay for off-net transit traffic. Otherwise, we will be transferring all that revenue to your competitor, X" This tends to be effective only for content providers, though, where the outbound traffic dominates, and you don't care if the inbound bits are coming over the "pay for" pipe vs the "settlement free" pipe. If you're an inbound-heavy shop, though, this won't really buy you much benefit. (And, if the revenue point isn't in the $x millions/year for the transit provider, they're more likely to just shrug and say "too much hassle...please, go be a headache for our competitor" rather than configuring a dual relationship like that--so it really only works for higher-volume relationships.) Matt