On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Joe Provo wrote: > Peering within [your own service area] should be considered a > no-brainer. Building outside your footprint is always an > interesting question; even if you have at least one major peering > point within your footprint, you may need to visit one or two > others outside your footprint to meet 'site diversity' and > multi-point requirements. Which are, just to reinforce what I believe to be Joe's point, _their_ business requirements, rather than _your_ business requirements, and thus should be considered more in the light of competitors attempting to compel uneconomic behavior in one, in order to reduce one's competitive advantage relative to themselves. Looking at this thread overall, one has to either work from the assumption that everyone's free to make this choice (that is, that a possible outcome is that there could be a situation in which everyone was free to buy transit somewhere, and thus free of the requirement of having a downstream or peer connection to the entire net), or the assumption that the existence of this choice as a possibility is dependent upon some people not making that choice ("Tier 1s") so that other people can choose to buy transit from them, or from their customers, or whatever. The former notion is certainly an interesting one to puzzle through the consequences of. :-) -Bill