On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 01:36:00PM -0400, alex@yuriev.com wrote:
Here's a fun exercise: Drop your 5 busiest peers, and see if your operating costs a) increase, b) decrease, or c) remain the same.
If your full cost of peering with UUNET (including things such as depreciation) comes to $400 per mbit/sec and via a promisig local ISP you can get transit to UUNET at $200 per mbit/sec, your costs will decrease. Just because the IP is free with peering does not mean that it costs $0 to peer.
Nor does it cost $0 on top of that $200 to buy transit. This may hold true to some degree for a small-ish network, but probably not for a larger one. Even factoring in depreciation, line cards, etc, I would imagine you won't find OC3 transit in 4 cities from any ISP to be as cheap as OC3 peering in 4 cities, for example. Add to that the chance that, as a larger network, you'll probably be getting your pipes at volume discounts. I never meant to imply that peering is 0-cost. I just don't agree with the blanket statement that peering (or lack thereof) has no financial impact. -c