On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
The perceived "money on the table" frequently doesn't exist and attempts to get it may produce the opposite result.
well, yeah, sure, but...
* Who they shift the traffic to may be your competitor.
...at least you know they are paying SOMEBODY, thus supporting the market you want to be in. you can then compete in that market. if everybody who could peer in N places worldwide could just get peering, then all kinds of per-bit revenue for "high tier" network owners would turn into per-port revenue for exchange point operators. where's the market in that? how could a "high tier" even exist in those conditions?
This is a straw man argument. I could just point out how it's technically wrong except that would be no fun so instead I'll give analogies first: Your argument is like saying that everybody that has taken a wood shop class in high school (or junior high) can build their own house, so home builders are going to be out of business. Or how about... Since everybody that has a truck can drive a package from San Jose to New York, Federal Express and United Parcel Service are no longer needed. Or most mundane yet... Everybody knows how to make sandwitches so there aren't going to be any kind large sandwitch chains, let alone multinational corporations that serve food. Seriously... Networks cost money to build and operate. Geography, both physical and political, provide for varying costs over different routes. The majority of large networks don't have the exact same routers in the exact same places connected with the exact same circuits. Operational costs, capital costs, customer service attitudes, and policies are different between companies. All of these features define the specific value added of a network. Economic pressure and the underlying technology determine how many companies can exist. Even if there were low barriers to entry, it doesn't mean that there won't be cases where it makes perfectly reasonable sense to some networks to outsource part of their infrastructure needs. This might be as simple as coverage for a specific market or backup capacity.
we will need to 1000X the traffic volume again before this stops working again. which should take about a year.
Heh. That should be interesting. :) In the long run capacity is likely to be capable of expanding at the rate of moores law. "Desired" bandwidth per end user appears to increase in a nonlinear manner at the introduction of new protocols (i.e. HTTP, Kazaa). If we have enough of these nonlinear transitions we might even someday be able to make a moores law equivalent for end user bandwidth demand (the chip industry has a few more years on us to be able to make empirical conclusions regarding industry constants). Then you could compare the curve of the end user bandwidth demand law to the moores law curve and make interesting prognostications. To illustrate how moores law and the hypothetical end user bandwidth demand law are different, for anybody that has upgraded their personal workstation to twice the processor speed or greater, to do the exact same end user task (i.e. visit a website) the day after you upgraded did you generate twice as much bandwidth? probably not. Mike. +----------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -----------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 510 580 4100 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting Colocation Fax 510 580 4151 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+