Roland Perry wrote:
In practice, regulators will only intervene at all, if one of the ISPs has SMP. This is now almost impossible to achieve (tests of "dominance" apply) especially with the diversity of transit providers. An SMP ISP would have to dominate the *entire* market for wholesale transit in a country.
Ireland differs significantly from the UK and many other european countries in that the number of ISPs and wholesale transit providers operating on the island is much smaller. While none of the ISPs has SMP designation, it is conceivable that it could happen, given the relative sizes of some of them. That said, though, it is extremely unlikely that the regulation engine is going to jump in and start dictating to the ISP's what they should or shouldn't do wrt IP peering. There has been an industry-run IX (INEX - http://www.inex.ie/) running for several years, and there have been remarkably few squabbles about peering during its lifetime. For this reason, if for no other, it is unlikely that SMP designation would serve any useful purpose in this instance. The ComReg directive is simply an implementation of directive 2002/19/EC, which will be applied in one form or another across all EU member states. These are personal opinions only. I do various work for the INEX, but do not speak for them. Nick