In message <199602030127.AA03799@mail.crl.com>, George Herbert writes:
MCI is in the Bay Area. I don't know what we'd do for Sura; are they paying someone for generalized transit, or just peering?
You question was how Pipex reaches Suranet. Suranet reaches the west coast via MCI. The transit issue is who transits the portion of 192/8 to providers like Pipex that just touch the East coast and don't have transit to the West coast, just access to direct customers of US providers who are at MaeEast (and for some MaeEast and Sprint NAP). A peering arrangement at a US West coast interconnect and no US transit agreement does not get you transit to a lot of places. If all of the major providers send traffic to 192/8, someone then has to provide transit to the portion of 192/8 that you can't get to from the West coast without a transit arrangement. Alternately, you could just require all of the providers who peer with someone with no transit agreement to the West coast to carry all the 192/8 prefixes for that peer only. What you then have is an agreement to do cross provider aggregation with any exchange interprovider traffic for a specific aggregate at a specific point only, with consideration given to the holes in the aggregate by every participating provider. This can be done in principle but would require more control over configuration than some providers are currently capable of. If you further scale back the idea to only providers whose router configuration is sufficiently automated to handle this, you start with the null set today, with one or two providers talking in the IETF RPS WG about being able to do this in a short while (which seems to be working out to be a large value of short:).
-george william herbert gherbert@crl.com
Curtis