WCOM (or anyone) has a certain amount of cost (people, management, etc) to deal with a peer. If they are a respectable network, they notify their peers of maintenance, and field their calls when sessions disappear. A large ISPs fees generally tend to be higher than a Joe Six Pack ISP. Regional routes for a Joe Six Pack ISP are not going to represent a significant enough level of traffic (1-2,5,10mb/s?) for a large network to waste management time on. Heck, DNS servers use more than 2mb/s of bandwidth nowadays (for medium sized networks and above). A few megabits a second is nothing. Deepak Jain AiNET -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Miquel van Smoorenburg Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 3:42 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Sprint peering policy In article <cistron.!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgAAAAAAAAA/zNkI7d3EEmn3+v5DgN/ l8KAAAAQAAAADJAemGHjDECnen8+YjBFaQEAAAAA@isprime.com>, Phil Rosenthal <pr@isprime.com> wrote:
Apples and oranges. Wcom isn't talking about dropping AT&T as a peer, they just don't want to peer with "Joe Six Pack ISP". Wcom would likely not peer with most ISPs, and I wouldn't expect them to. They gain absolutely nothing from it, and the small ISPs gain plenty. Wcom's costs only increase since they need "more ports".
Wcom could peer with "Joe Six Pack ISP" at an exchange if - connection cost is very low (shared ethernet) - they don't peer with Joe's upstream at the same location - they only announce regional routes to Joe - they use hot potato routing everywhere in that case, the peering would just be local/regional, probably all that Joe is after anyway Mike.