Isn't being a pioneer doing best-exit to eliminate the cost imbalances? I thought that was the whole idea behind what BBN/Exodus were doing.
On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
In fact, what you're advocating is billing the sender for *solicited data* from the recipient's point of view!
Not at all. I am advocating paying for transit. When A and B use roughly the same amount of each other's transit, there is no point in counting the difference. But when you have an asymmetric situation, rather than cutting off peering altogether because the other guy is too different, why not have a scalable peering situation that directly addresses the asymmetry in traffic flows. The only other solution that I can see is for the network receiving the huge incoming flow to direct all that web traffic through transparent web caches at each exchange point. However that just raises increased barriers to peering and does not deal with non-cacheable dataflows which are increasing over time. Scalable peering would reduce the barriers to peering and make it easier for new players to buy in. They would still have to build a truly national network, but at that point they could not have the door slammed in their faces.
Regardless of whether my proposed solution is the correct one or just a bad idea produced by indigestion, you cannot deny that the asymmetry between networks is increasing as network providers specialize the services they offer. The old-fashioned rough-cut peering is becoming more and more unsuitable as the only peering option. We need new ways to do this. Somebody has to take the first step. Somebody has to be a pioneer.
The details can always be hashed out later.
-- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com