More like a preference/QoS war - peering has little to do with it. BS et al will provide their customers a route to Google, Yahoo, etc - anything else is economic suicide. The big question is, can they convince the content players that they need preferential transport. Anyone with a clue would say that things are working just fine, and that the bits won't move any faster in an uncongested and uncontested modern Internet backbone network. The RBOCs need to get over this - they are floundering around to try and find a way to recoup network costs. This is one front. IMS is another. I feel their pain, but this battle has been lost. It has taken ten years, but content has turned out to be king, at least as far as profit margins go. The RBOCs are paying for their lack of vision. Perhaps the RBOCs can do better with IPTV and take on the MSOs? Who knows, but this effort to wring profit out of done deals is a sign of desperation from companies that have lost the ability to innovate. - Daniel Golding On 1/19/06 6:44 PM, "Paul Vixie" <paul@vix.com> wrote:
proving once again that "peering ratios" only matter if the other guy's customers can live without your "assymetric" content, here are two articles i saw today via slashdot. what's interesting to me is whether bellsouth will be sued some time later by some other content provider for de-peering them without also having applied the same rules to google. note, this isn't a bellsouth-specific rant, they just happen to be mentioned in today's story.
--------
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/blog/archives/2006/01/google_we_wont.html Google: We Won't Pay Broadband Cyberextortion January 18, 2006
BellSouth and Verizon have been trying to force big Web sites to pay extortion-type fees if the sites want adequate bandwidth, with Google a prime target. But Google has news for them: It won't pay. [...]
--------
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/blog/archives/2006/01/bellsouth_cyber.html BellSouth: Cyberextortion Pays Off January 17, 2006
BellSouth's new business model, a slightly more polite form of the kind of extortion practiced by Tony Soprano, is starting to pay off. The company says it is in negotiations with several Web sites willing to pay extra fees to BellSouth for more bandwidth than it provides to other sites. [...]
--------