"I've said it before and I'll say it again: an ISP's refusal to maintain a settlement-free open peering policy is directly linked with said company's fraudulent double-billing for services." aaannnddd.. I'm done with that post. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us> To: "Brandon Butterworth" <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> Cc: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 7:03:34 PM Subject: Re: The IPv6 Travesty that is Cogent's refusal to peer Hurricane Electric - and how to solve it On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 1:52 PM, Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
I'd like to peer with all tier 1's, they are thus all bad as they won't.
Correct. I've said it before and I'll say it again: an ISP's refusal to maintain a settlement-free open peering policy is directly linked with said company's fraudulent double-billing for services. In case you don't see it, I'll explain: whatever fictions you may tell yourselves, your customers pay you to connect them to the entire Internet. So do the other guy's customers. Settlement free peering means that at no _additional_ charge to anyone, you accept the packets your customers have paid you to accept from the other guy's customers. And vice versa. Peering does not trade packets you haven't been paid for. That's another fiction. Peering only trades packets one of your customers has paid you for. I get from there to double-billing because the alternative to settlement free peering is a paid relationship. The other guy has to buy from you directly (becoming the second payer for each packet) or he has to buy from one of the peers you've accepted But the peers you've accepted are constrained by ratios an related technical requirements which functionally prevent them from adding a sizable amount of traffic from that other guy, so unless he's doing a trifling business he pretty much has to buy service from you. Even though another customer has already paid you to perform that activity, you refuse to do the job unless the second party also becomes your customer and pays you. Fraud. Hidden behind a wall of technical minutiae but fraud all the same. Don't get me wrong. You can cure this fraud without going to extremes. An open peering policy doesn't require you to buy hardware for the other guy's convenience. Let him reimburse you or procure the hardware you spec out if he wants to peer. Nor do you have to extend your network to a location convenient for the other guy. Pick neutral locations where you're willing to peer and let the other guy build to them or pay you to build from there to him. Nor does an open peering policy require you to give the other guy a free ride on your international backbone: you can swap packets for just the regions of your network in which he's willing to establish a connection. But not ratios and traffic minimums -- those are not egalitarian, they're designed only to exclude the powerless. Taken in this context, the Cogent/HE IPv6 peering spat is very simple: Cogent is -the- bad actor. 100%. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>