On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 05:15:48AM +0000, Paul Vixie wrote:
Peering? Who needs peering if transit can be had for $20 per megabit per second?
anyone whose applications are too important to risk dependency on OPNs (other people's networks).
OPNs also carry some of the consumers of your bits and you consume some of theirs. Unless you're peering with every laptop directly, somewhere, somehow, you'll be traveling on OPNs, wether it is dark fiber, a circuit, or a wavelength. Time to bust out the cardinal vs ordinal optimization argument again. option a) getting the best decision for certain (cost $1 million) option b) Getting a decision within the top 5% With probability = 0.99 (cost $1 million/x), In real life, we often settle for such a tradeoff with x=100 to 10,000 Under independent sampling, variance decreases as 1/sqrt(n). Each order of magnitude increase in certainty requires 2 orders of magnitude increase in sampling cost. To go from p=0.99 to certainty (p=0.99999) implies a 1,000,000 fold increase in sampling cost. So, instead of creating very nice soundbites like OPNs (which I will be shamelessly appropriating for my own use thank you very much), I suggest we spend a bit more time actually _analysing_ using techniques from operations research as to _what_ gives us the most bang for the buck. Dan golding has it right re: peering not being a philosophy, but rather an _engineering_ decision. I touched upon this at the Great Peering Debate at the NANOG Miami, which was hosted by Bill Norton. /vijay