I phoned Sprint asking them to look into it - and I do have to say they were very responsive and conducted extensive testing - and the bottleneck turned out to be, surprise surprise, MAE-WEST.
Actually, I'd be more than willing to bet money that it's NOT actually MAE-WEST itself that is the problem. What has been happening is that the major NSP's have been redesigning thier networks to try and get a handle on the incredible growth rates. The "big boys" have gone to a private interconnection type of arrangement that allows the traffic to flow between them at multiple points with much less congestion. (Jeff and Jack from MCI and Hank or Kurt from Sprint could possibly elaborate upon this topology) The one outstanding problem that results from this is that the resources of thses companies are no longer directed at the meet points as an important (allow me some license here guys) part of thier network. So now all of the traffic originating from peers at the meet points moves happily across the meet point to the NSP's router, and then hops onto a DS-3 to travel from the meet point router to thier backbone. There are two achilles heels here. The port at the meet point (a switched FDDI port still can only handle 100Mbps simplex), and the link between the NSP's meet router and thier backbone. I think in most cases one will find that these are the locations of the problem, and it's not really a problem that can be fixed by adding more hardware or new technology at the meet points. It's more a policy and financial decision that must be made by the NSP's.
Since all the discussion on what backbone (tier 1) providers can do to improve interconnection seems to have done something - intra-provider traffic seems to be much better nowadays than it was last year - can we start doing the same with major exchange points such as MAE-WEST and MAE-EAST, etc?
Again, I think one of the guys I mentioned above could better express thier ideas here...
If the problem is that the routers/gigaswitches are overloaded, perhaps some sort of intelligent traffic analysis and division might be in order?
Now this definately has merit. Strong planning (a point that I'm weak in) by both the Exchange operators and the NSP's could prevent a large part of the congestion that shows up. But again, you must look at things from the other side. If I give peering to someone (say a regional ISP), I have to invest money into my network to handle the traffic load they send me. If I sell a circuit to that regional, then there is a revenue stream to maintain the network. Peering has become a financial decision in addition to a network engineering decision. This is really where some type of settlement method needs to be established if peering as we know it today is to remain a viable method of interconnecting the networks. Chris A. Icide Senior Engineer Nap.Net, L.L.C.