Hi Toby, its not going to be that simple tho is it, partially because the technology is different and partially because of legacy. eg do you charge for packets sent or packets received? if its sent then hosting companies are in trouble, if its received then its the access companies. eg2 you cant just say 'major networks pay interconnect' if you do it you really need to do it everywhere and then that means working out interconnect costs for every single peer which is a lot of admin! Steve
What I find most interesting about all these disputes is that none of the major players appear to be even slightly interested in settled interconnection - like they have in the telephony world.
Before you all flame me for mindless idealism :-) YES I know the gore is in the detail. YES it's a million miles from simple.
The way I see it though, is that if there's a will there must be a way and there is clearly a will to change today's status quo. These top tier networks are relatively stable, they are large enough for deliberate manipulation of metrics to be operationally very sensitive/ cumbersome.
There was a paper I saw ages ago:
http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/iip/cai/farnon.html
that discussed some of the economics behind peering. Though it's a bit old now, many of it's arguments hold true (hence todays CW/PSI/MFN/UUNet conundrums). It also just begins to explore the possiblities (and difficulties) of billaterally settled peering.
Though any system for performing this would need to be far more fair and robust than anything proposed in the paper, I perceive there to be a vast opportunity for this model of Interconnection - the gap between free peering and transit is too great to fit all relationships and the higher the financial stakes get, the more free interconnect relationships will be stressed.
As a plus point there would be more cash flow (even without any net gain/loss), which seems to be flavour of the month with telco's at the moment.
Maybe an independent third party would help here - like the clearinghouses/S&Ps of this world. Anyone got any cash they want to invest? (only kidding). The idea being that we get our own commercial regulator, rather than some .gov one.
cheers Toby ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- std disclaimer about the above being my opinions only etc -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Stephen J. Wilcox IP Services Manager, Opal Telecom http://www.opaltelecom.co.uk/ Tel: 0161 222 2000 Fax: 0161 222 2008