James Smith wrote (on May 10):
Maybe it is possible he made a business decision based on the long term costs involved with multihoming/redundancy vs. the loss of near total reachability. He may have come to the conclusion that the probability of that scenario occuring was not sufficient reason to multihome. His call.
It's worth pointing out it's not always a technical decision. Partcularly when things are tight, the bean-counters and other senior management tend to shy away from "redunancy" and "resilience" often in favour of "insurance policies" and "controlled risk". Similar business-decisions are what cause those networks to not peer. Whether fair or not doesn't matter. Big companies are big businesses. Big businesses like to remain big. They all have debt and thus need revenue. A common view is that a peer is the loss of a potential customer. Drop all your peers, gain some potential customers. (Sprint said this to me in those words once) While nobody has tried to take a "Tier-1" to court for what could be taken as anti-competitive actions said providers will carry on - it's win-win for them. The marginal loss of connectivity to *your* network is so small from their perspective, there's no issue. If mutual customers complain, they blame you for not connecting to them (from experience, and having seen this done in black and white). The words used are along the lines of "that is what happens when you connect to a non-tier-1, like us". Just for reference, the European Peering Policy for one of the previously mentioned carriers in this thread requires the announcement of 900+ /19's from seperate LIR assignments, as well as the usual N-points connected, M-bps transfered etc requirements. I'm under NDA so can't say more. needless to say, we don't peer with them, and I don't buy transit from them either, on principle. We calculated that at the time only 5 IP providers in Europe (that were not US owned networks) would meet that 900+ /19's requirement. Chris.