On Fri Nov 30, 2001 at 10:39:57PM -0500, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
My question was simply a curiosity ping of _why_ people peer with each other; in my mind, it had always, and never not, been a way to reduce cost of traffic sent/rec'd. I was curious as to whether or not others had a similar view to mine.
For us, I'd say there's a two-fold win. 1) Cost. We try to aim for less than $100/mbps on peering connections. This isn't always the case when first connecting to a NAP, because PtP circuits and NAP ports aren't charged per mbps, so the cost per mbps is much higher for the first 10 or 20 meg, and comes down after that. It also serves to expand our potential network capacity. This can work right to extremes - in the UK (our primary geographical target region), we can reach probably 99% of users without using our transit with Level3 and others in the USA. 2) More direct relationships with end-user ISPs. Okay, there's no formal SLAs or anything like that, but there *is* a relationship between us and a peer. When a user complains about connectivity issues, it's more likely that there's just two parties involved - us and the user's ISP. We're not transitting through 2 or 3 other ISPs in the middle - all of which could be the cause of problems. Simon -- Simon Lockhart | Tel: +44 (0)1737 839676 Internet Engineering Manager | Fax: +44 (0)1737 839516 BBC Internet Services | Email: Simon.Lockhart@bbc.co.uk Kingswood Warren,Tadworth,Surrey,UK | URL: http://support.bbc.co.uk/