To top it all off, it is not all that clear that AboveNet has no retail transit feeds. I personally know of a few ISPs using AboveNet facilities. They re-sell Covad DSL and bring the Covad feed into their AboveNet cage, they re-route it up from there. Of course, they are also doing this with ELI. The thing is that they use the AboveNet internet backbone and the Covad telco backbone, in an AboveNet cage, to refer to the specific example. AboveNet is not in the position to know, or care, they just sell the cage and the internet backbone. Since Covad is also in SJC, and they only sell telco backbone, they don't care either. The titular ISP, works the margins (as always).
-----Original Message----- From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean@donelan.com] Sent: Monday, January 15, 2001 10:37 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Favorites (Re: UUNET peering policy)
On Sun, 14 January 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:
sean@donelan.com (Sean Donelan) writes:
If you look at Abovenet's traffic graphs, you'll notice Abovenet has a wide variety of traffic balances with different providers. Some in Abovenet's favor (such as 3:1 with Sprint, 5:1 with Teleglobe) and some in the other provider's favor (such as 1:3 with Exodus). ...
"Favor"? What, precisely, connotes "favor" in this regard? Sending more, or receiving more? And: why?
Which side of the debate do you want to take?
The traditional arguement is a network composed mostly of a few large data centers, with lots of servers sending traffic is getting a "free ride" on the network which built out nationwide and has POPs in every LATA.
UUNET deserves a return on its investment on all those wholesale dialup POPs and circuits to underserved rural areas. Abovenet is just cream skimming in a few large metro areas, while UUNET does the hard work of carrying that extra traffic imbalance. Abovenet selling "cheap" bandwidth because it doesn't have the cost of delievering the traffic that UUNET has to pay.
The opposite side is Abovenet has invested a lot into its sites and MFN into its networks. It just choose to do it in a different way than UUNET. Its more expensive to lay fiber in metro areas than rural areas. It costs a lot of money to operate the centers. Whether the traffic is being paid by the millions of $19.95 dialup users on UUNET's wholesale ports or by the hundreds of hosters in Abovenet's sites, the traffic is paid.