At 2:04 AM -0500 1/26/97, Eric D. Madison wrote:
I don't think anyone has actually started charging "settlements" which is what your CEO is probably talking about. It's been a rumor for quite a while that settlement based peering will happen. Very similar to how the utilities companies manage "traffic". You would count bits into your network from peer X and he would count bits from your network, whoever has the lowest number has to pay the difference. So, if you are a small provider, your going to have to pay the big boys to carry your customers traffic. Welcome to the new Internet, where the bottom line is the driving factor. Especially since the margins are so low and no-one has made any money yet (will we ever?).
A good reference on financial issues in peering models is http://iepg.org/settlements.html, a paper by Geoff Huston.
Since some of the larger vendors (Cisco mostly) has introduced accounting features into their software settlements could start any time. It's just a matter of time until someone actually announces it.. who will jump first? I have my guess but I don't think I want to announce it publicly. :)
Eric
On Sun, 26 Jan 1997, Dave Curado wrote:
Curious thing, the CEO of my company called me the other day and was worried about who we were peering with. It seems someone put a bug in his ear that the larger providers were about to start charging some of the smaller providers for bilateral peering.
I haven't heard anything about that at all... so either a) the ceo is mistaken b) I've missed some important annoucement recently
either is possible.
Has anyone else heard anything about this?