Customers don't want to pay for a "stochastic set of relationships", they will pay for the "Internet" however.
Perhaps we have lied to the them? The internet has always been a stochastic set of relationships -- some relationships of which are based upon two people getting drunk together at the right place, at the right time. Is anyone going to deny this? Further, the internet has always been a best-effort medium. We, as xSP's, have done our best to make the 'best' in 'best effort' as good as we can, to varying levels of success. The fact that the internet is hugely successful, and mostly reliable, is due to smart people and some level of luck. Not because someone peers with someone else. It wasn't designed this way.
It's like paying for a telephone that could only call a subset of the
Please, for the love of god, do not make analogies to the phone network.
Call me crazy if you'd like, but I tend to think that peering on the Internet is too important...
Do you think a thread which has made 100 posts on nanog, with people coming out of the woodwork who I haven't seen in years, is something that anyone things is not important? -- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex@nac.net, latency, Al Reuben Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net