On Dec 4, 2010, at 5:28 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
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.
Ratios either make sense, or they don't. I don't see how "type of network" fits into it. If you are a restaurant, you do not decide whether or not to charge customer for food based on whether or not they work at another restaurant. If your are eyeball and content wants to peer with you, make a decision based on your costs and profits. Ratios are a proxy for real cost / benefit. As Leo mentioned (and Bill snipped), if $LARGE_CONTENT has a single location and $LARGE_EYEBALL has to carry it all over the country, the ratio "matters" supposedly because large eyeball has to carry those bits everywhere. The implicit statement here is that large content gives a rats ass about large eyeball's costs. Repeat after me: I DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR COSTS. What's more, you don't care about mine. If cisco says "well, I know the Juniper has the same features and is cheaper, but my costs are higher!", do you then buy the cisco? HELL NO. The other person's costs are irrelevant to your decision. If large eyeball finds it cheaper to pay $LARGE_TRANSIT for those bits, perhaps because eyeball can make transit carry the bits to a local hub, then eyeball should not peer. If eyeball would actually pay more to transit than carrying the bits from content's single location, yet still does not peer, then eyeball's peering manager should be fired. You cost my company money to boost your ego, you're out on your ass. Of course, I am glossing over the idea that eyeball could pay transit a short while to see if he can get a concession out of content. Maybe eyeball assumes content has transit costs as well, so eyeball thinks he can force content to pay something. This is probably where the idea of "similar value" popped into the peering lexicon. But that is standard business negotiations, and honestly has nothing to do with similar value. In reality, content & eyeball have no idea of the other's true costs (probably not even the $/Mbps they pay for transit), so the idea of coming to a "similar value" agreement is ludicrous. Make the decisions that are best for your company. Not best for your ego. Remember people, the Internet is a business. Peering is a business tool, not some playground where teacher is enforcing some notion of fairness. -- TTFN, patrick P.S. I'm ignoring the idea of "if we give it away free to one, everyone will want it free". Trust me, they all want it "free" anyway. And saying "you gave it to him for free!" sounds more like that schoolyard than a business negotiation. Besides, if you come to me and say "this other network got $FOO", I will tell you I couldn't possibly talk about that under NDA, their deal is irrelevant to our deal, and each deal is far too unique to be compared. Then bitch at the other network for breaking our NDA. Breaking NDAs is bad, mmmmm-KAY?