On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, John Fraizer wrote:
The question then becomes one of: Which end of the equation do you want to be on? The one sending traffic or the one receiving traffic? How does one determine who is at greater benefit from the peering relationship?
If you are a web host you are generally willing to pay for bandwidth going towards the "net"....as your customers care if they can get to all of the "dialin" users. If you are a internet access provider you generally care more about bandwidth coming from the "net"....as your customers want to get to the web hosts. So assume that a primarily Web Hosting company peers with a internet access provider. The web host wants to pay to send traffic to the dialups and the iap wants to pay to recieve traffic from the web sites. The "willingness to pay" seems kinda one-directional here - the path from the web hosts to the iap. This whole settlement based idea is really screwy. If the model was that the people hosting the sites on the web paid for everything including access, then I could see settling based on bidirectional flows to a given "endpoint". Basically each section along the path to a given customer would get a small portion of the settlement. (you could argue the other way - that if the iaps were paying for the whole thing, the path the other direction would get it....). But that isn't the case. We live in a world where both the hosters and the accessors are paying for their access. Any settlement based in that system will be unfair as it is almost impossible to put a different value on each end of the link. Who's to say for a given AS whether inbound or outbound is more important? If someone (off list) could explain to me how flows in a given direction actually relate consistently to value, I'd appreciate it. Note that I am not talking about say a smallish ISP purchasing a "Customer Routes Only, no transit" link to a larger isp. That's a whole different ball of yarn. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) KD7EHZ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648 ----------------------------------------------------------------------