* ops.lists@gmail.com (Suresh Ramasubramanian) [Mon 28 Apr 2014, 15:27 CEST]:
Comcast sells wholesale transit - http://www.comcast.com/dedicatedinternet/?SCRedirect=true
And it has a settlement free peering policy - with a stated requirement that traffic exchanged be symmetrical.
How is that possibly realistic? They have 22 million customers (soon to become 29) with wildly asymmetrical connections and a very typical consumption pattern. Should Netflix change its apps that they upload an equal amount of bandwidth back to Netflix's servers to balance this out? That way lies madness. SBC had a much saner policy, from their 2006 SFI peering guidelines document: "No requirement for a balanced traffic exchange ratio due primarily to the asymmetric nature of current broadband metallic transmission systems such as ADSL and cable modems." (Then AT&T happened.)
Now, that big elephant in the room taken into account, where do the middlemen come in here?
Middlemen as in transit providers? The world is larger than Comcast's coverage area so there is a very good market for your middlemen. -- Niels. --