Geoff writes:
The peering game has no real objective rules - its a game that is played out in the jungle every night - you see a pair of eyes a few inches in front of you - should you try to eat it or try to get away? Unfortunately there's not enough information to make a rational choice, so you would normally run away, but if you are also hungry at the same time.....
(Note to self: Do not walk with Geoff at night....) Permit me to humbly suggest that this metaphor is more vivid than accurate. The available behaviors include many more than fight and flight. Among others I can think of are: (honestly) offer to cooperate, (dishonestly) attempt to defraud the eyes' owner out of resources, and even call in the regulators to have *them* eat the eyes' owner instead. It's a big, wild world out there and almost everything has been tried once. Sometimes twice.
The interactions in the inter-Provider space tend to work out to one of three outcomes:
1 Either A pays B unconditionally (and becomes a customer of B) (and, yes, this includes 'paid peering')
2 A and B do not interconnect directly, and resolve connectivity through third party interactions
3 A and B interconnect and agree not to pay each other - i.e. peering
From an engineering standpoint the interactions in Inter-provider space all boil down to that one question: do these ASes exchange
I think this elides one of the most important questions: pays for what? There are cases that look like (1) where the revenue A pays B is earmarked as revenue for a layer 2 pipe to reach a POP or NAP at which layer 3 traffic is traded under terms that look (3). Is the IP traffic in that case an inducement to buy the layer 2 pipe, is the agreement a way of hiding the fact that A pays B for peering, or evidence that B still thinks like a telco? Business relationships can be convoluted; I know of cases where who pays whom is actually banded in a way that means A pays B if A sends lower than N/mbps or higher than 3N/mbps but B pays A otherwise. The motivation behind that agreement is pretty tortured (at least three of the people involved are still in therapy), but it results in A and B trading traffic. traffic directly, or is there an AS in the middle? From a business standpoint, there are as many potential interactions layered on top that simple question as there are business models drifting in the trash baskets of the VCs on Sand Hill Road. I agree with Sean Donelan that the use of the same term "peering" for "direct BGP-based traffic exchange" and "cost-free traffic exchange" makes things very difficult. Unfortunately, I can't see "neighboring" taking off as an alternative. regards, Ted Hardie