howland@Priss.com (Curt Howland) writes:
The 'Net gives some measure of universal connectivity because it was driven at its root by engineering. Who on NANOG, with any real world experience in networking, denies that maximum open peering benefits everyone?
Well, I dunno if I'm qualified by that measure. At the time I built networks, I'd built at least one of the largest anywhere. But they were all small compared to today's second tiers, and I'm not building networks any more. But I deny your assertion. Maximum open peering benefits some people more than others -- specifically the ones who get to charge the most money yet who pay the least in infrastructure upkeep. A web hosting company doing shortest-exit (no matter how many peering points they were at or how much private peering they had) would be an example. Remember as you puzzle your way through this issue that peering is only mutually beneficial if the number of bits (not packets) sent by each side is in the same order of magnitude. If the O(mag)'s differ then the costs/benefits are one-sided, and the side who is underwriting wide area transportation costs for people who aren't paying it money is going to get bent about it. Anyone with a strong enough constitution to check the archives on this matter will find that Sean and I had a raging battle here about this very topic back in 1993 or so. What interests me on this particular night is my memory of asking Vince "so what about gatekeeper.dec.com? why should i have to pay to transmit the FTP archives?" Vince didn't answer because the obvious answer ("gatekeeper should be charging money so it can cover its costs and the costs of the folks who carry those bits") was one I was not at that time ready to hear or understand. -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA "Many NANOG members have been around <paul@vix.com> longer than most." --Jim Fleming pacbell!vixie!paul (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)