On 1 Jun 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:
So, can anyone explain why C&W, UUNET or Genuity care about traffic balance, other than to limit competition by providers who are better at attracting particular types of customers than them?
You have the cart before the horse (effect before cause), there are really two principles that come before the example policy effect above. They are truisms. For the purposes of the rules below the term monopolistic peering refers to core networks that have policies that would limit their peers to 10 or so networks IF they were uniformly applied to all their current peers (which they are invariably not (even though a few might be snubbed for general purposes of crassness, ergo C&W depeering a few arbitrarily)). 1) The first rule of monopolistic peering is that the policy MUST overwhelmingly favor the writer of the policy. This is a truism, no company defines a policy that requires them to pay settlements, only vice versa. For example, this means that for all the lip service paid to settlement based peering compensating the parties equitably you will not find any that allow both parties to be paid. The few settlement based peering contracts I've heard of typically are written as transit fading to settlement free peering when some goal is met (the "correct" ratio and the "correct" quantity of traffic). That is, only one side ever gets compensated. If UUnet offers you a settlement based peering contract you can bet they will not extend you the exact same compensation if you manage to turn the tables on them and attract customers that suck traffic instead of push. Otherwise people would rush out and implement that as a business model. 2) The second rule of monopolistic peering is that the policy MUST be written in a way that allows you to severely limit who you peer with. This is a truism, in order to get the number of qualifying networks down to 10 or so one must write sufficiently restrictive policies. See, Sean, your error was assuming the rationalization accompanying the rules you see in the more restrictive peering policies legitimately represents the effect of the the policy. heh. ;) Hrmmm... By the way, many large networks are not monopolistic. Some have hundreds of peers and continue to evolve and grow their networks, taking into account new market entrants that become sufficiently established. Presumably these networks will provide lower latency and more direct routes (asuming that is what you want) than once upon a time tier one networks that have aggressively shrunk the number of strategic business partners (um, peers, yeah them, who without your network becomes rather boring). +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 510 580 4100 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting Colocation Fax 510 580 4151 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+