In a message written on Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 05:52:30PM -0500, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
- Peering should cost significantly less than transit. At least half, probably less. If you have 1.5 Gig, getting $50 a meg transit is trivial today. I can't imagine any company paying $50 a meg for peering, no matter what the circumstances.
I'll make one issue about that blanket statement of the price of peering. [issue deleted]
Your analysis is not completely wrong when considering only settlement free peering, or only transit. I was intending to address the middle case, a settlement based peer. I'm also assuming these people are close to a settlement free peer. That is, if you allow a 2:1 peer, and someone comes in at 1001:500 Mbps, charging them the same as the transit price for either the full 1001 (which I contend is amazingly foolish), or just for the 1 (something I could live with, in some situations) doesn't make sense. You're trying to even out a perceived inequity, and I will argue strongly that the cost of moving an extra meg across an existing peering circuit is _far_ less than moving a transit meg. All in all, I find ratios an extremely poor way of validating a peer. I can think of many cases where it is in both parties interest to peer, but where the traffic might be extremely unbalanced. Yes, the fact that it is unbalanced can shift costs from one provider to another, and that's a very real problem to solve. The correct way to solve it is not to force a transit model though, but to use careful circuit provisioning and various technical tools to move the cost back to something more equal. Heck, even a settlement, much as I hate them, would be better than just turning the thing off. What's even funnier is that most people apply them equally in both directions. They want to make the claim that being out of ratio (such as in this case) shifts costs onto their network. Well, many people do the same thing in reverse. If they saw a 1:3 they would not peer with someone /even though they are shifting cost to the other party/. I've never understood how someone can argue that a ratio is about protecting their company from bearing a disproportionate amount of the cost, and then also prevent their company from shifting that cost to someone else (assuming the other party would agree). -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org