On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
- Ratio needs to be dropped from all peering policies. It made sense back when the traffic was two people e-mailing each other. It was a measure of "equal value". However the net has evolved. In the face of streaming audio and video, or rich multimedia web sites Content->User will always be wildly out of ratio. It has moved from a useful measure, to an excuse to make Content pay in all circumstances.
I think that's the key point here - ratios make sense when similar types of carriers are peering with each other, whether that's traditional Tier 1s or small carriers or whatever; they don't make sense when an eyeball network is connecting to a content-provider network. The eyeball network can argue that it's doing all the work, because the content provider is handing it 99% of the bits, but the content provider can argue that the eyeball network makes its money delivering bits asymmetrically to its end users, and they'll be really annoyed if they can't get the content they want. There are still balance-of-power issues - Comcast won't get much complaint if it drops traffic from Podunk Obscure Hosting Services, so they can bully Podunk into paying them, while Podunk Rural Wireless Services will get lots of complaint from its users if it drops traffic from YouTube. Level 3 is functioning not only as a transport provider for smaller content providers, but also as an aggregated negotiation service, though in this case the content provider, Netflix, is big enough to matter. (Some years ago, when they were DVDs by mail only, it was estimated that they had a bandwidth about 1/3 that of the total (US?) internet, just with slightly higher latency) (or significantly lower latency, if you were still on modems.) -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.