In a message written on Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 04:29:05PM -0400, Adam Rothschild wrote:
I like to see Level 3 arguing this with the regulators. AboveNet persued this line of thinking with a number of ISP's in the late 1990's with some success, and I believe others did as well. AboveNet implmented it by honoring MEDs from peers, and thus doing a cold potato routing and carrying a higher bit-mile cost. Ratio is the most broken part about modern peering agreements. Ratio really has no bearing on the costs to either ISP, it is an artifact of their position in the world. That is to say the type of ISP (end user, content) location (urban, rural) or technologies (dsl, cable, leased line) along with user behavior determine the ratio. Early ISP's that had similar customer mixes, locations, and technologies could use ratio as an easy proxy, but those days are long gone. The primary challenge to change is the technical community coming up with some metric that is easy to measure and senior management can understand. You can go to a VP and say "the ratio to them is 1.5:1" and they get it (or so they think). Trying to make the same argument that on some vague level you are deriving "equal benefit" is much larger. I like Level 3's effort in using the bit-mile cost but I don't know any way to measure that metric easily on a large network. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/