Well, it only took the press 9 days to get a story out, I guess that isn't all bad. The Washington Post now has a story on this issue: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45819-2002Dec27.html It claims AOL wants $75000/month. If we use the $50/meg Andrew Partan posted that would be an even 1.5 Gig, which is an entirely plausible number for the traffic level (given previous rumor of 2xOC-12, eg 1.2 Gig, recently upgraded to 2xOC-48). I'll offer two comments from my own opinion: - Peering should cost significantly less than transit. At least half, probably less. If you have 1.5 Gig, getting $50 a meg transit is trivial today. I can't imagine any company paying $50 a meg for peering, no matter what the circumstances. Perhaps that was the point though. - In my opinion, if you want to enforce a ratio and charge people who do not meet it, the charge should only be on the difference. That is, say it was 1500 Mbps Cogent->AOL, and 500Mbps AOL->Cogent. The first 1000 Mbps (2x500, 2:1 ratio), Cogent->AOL should be free, as they would be if there was less traffic. Charging for the extra 500, while not something I advocate, would be fair. To make it such that 1000Mbps would be "free", but 1001 Mbps means to pay for the first 1000 is just stupid. People don't generally accept pricing models that have large jumps in them, they want something progressive. I wonder what Cogent's response would have been if the charge was only for the amount over 2:1, and was a reasonable price for peering, perhaps $15/Meg and AOL gets to pick the locations.... -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org