On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 3:05 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
So by extension, if you enter an agreement and promise to remain balanced y= ou can just willfully throw that out and abuse the heck out of it? Where do= es it end? Why even bother having peering policies at all then?
It doesn't strike you as a ridiculous promise to extract from someone?
You could certainly say its ridiculous, but it is (and has been) the basis for almost all peering arrangements in North America for several decades in my personal experience. I believe that the practice came from the telco world when large telephone companies would exchange traffic without billing each other so long as the traffic was relatively balanced. You can imagine AT&T and Sprint exchange toll traffic and so long as things we're fairly close there wasn't a big imbalance of traffic to worry the financial folks over and thus having to do exact accounting on each minute, which was technically challenging 30 years ago. "Hi I'm an Internet company. I don't actually know what the next big
thing next year will be but I promise that I won't host it on my network and cause our traffic to become lopsided."
Wow. Is that what you're saying?
That's not what happened. What happened is that Netflix went to Level 3 who already had a peering arrangement with Comcast which was built around normal (roughly) balanced peering. It had been in place for years before Netflix signed with Level 3 and worked, and was contracted this way, around relatively balanced traffic. Once Netflix started sending most of their traffic destined to Comcast end user through Level 3 things got out of balance. Netflix still has a contract with Cogent (I believe that is the correct one) or other provider that had previously been handling the bulk of the Comcast directed traffic, but the Level 3 connection was cheaper for Netflix. If anyone actually acted in bad faith it was, IMO, Level 3.
To use an analogy, if you and I agree to buy a car together and agree to sw= itch off who uses it every other day, can I just say "forget our agreement = =96 I=92m just going to drive the car myself every single day =96 its all m= ine=94?
Seems like a poor analogy since I'm pretty sure both parties on a peering can use the port at the same time.
His point was you can't simply change a contract without having both parties involved. Level 3 tried to do just that.
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.