On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Jon Lewis wrote:
On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Robert Bowman wrote:
We do not have transit. Whomever showed the traceroute via Sprint must be using a Sprint connected host, so they need to check their facts. It's real easy, if BBN takes the PXs down, there will be disconnectivity. To the best of my knowledge, CRL also has a similar condition.
Sounds like a high stakes game of Internet Peering Chicken. Who gets damaged the most when BBN customers complain they cannot access Exodus and Abovenet customers, and Exodus and Abovenet customers complain they cannot be accessed by BBN customers? If I were a BBN customer, I'd be pissed. If I were hosted by Abovenet, I wouldn't be too happy either.
That is one thing I don't understand about the aversion to peering. We peer with anyone who will either pay the line costs or connect to us over Bell FR, where the costs are negligible. Granted, we are small potatoes in the ISP field, but to my way of thinking both parties benefit. There is a customer here communicating with a customer there. Both ISPs are getting money from their customer to get connectivity to the other ISP's customer. Dropping the peering connection degrades connectivity for both ISPs' customers. I understand that there is a an issue about a smaller player using the larger player's long-haul links for transport, but in this case it seems that Exodus is neither a significantly smaller player nor are they using BBN's links for long-haul. In fact, it seems that if Exodus were to purchase transit, all that traffic would be moved to a single peering point between BBN and whoever they purchased traffic from, which *would* be using BBN's long-haul network. Not to mention that the asymmetry of that link would become the same level of a "problem" as the current links to Exodus. I don't expect that a small ISP like ourselves could go to any of the major ISPs and expect to peer for free, but in this case it looks like BBN gets at least as much benefit as Exodus of the current arrangement.
Perhaps BBN management just passed a course in Tearing up the Internet for fun and profit.
More likely they think they have Exodus/etc backed into a corner with no option but to pay BBN for transit. John Tamplin Traveller Information Services jat@Traveller.COM 2104 West Ferry Way 256/705-7007 - FAX 256/705-7100 Huntsville, AL 35801