From: Alan Hannan[SMTP:alan@gi.net]
Pondering many things.
I have certainly been trying my best to gain as complete an understanding of these 'things' as I possibly can while constructing a backbone, and so will offer my (hopefully not _too_ clueless) thoughts:
Why is it not in my best interest to talk to NSPX at a meet point?
My thought, conspiratorally, is that larger folks (NSP4) could care less about talking to NSP3's p% of the net, when there is a lower cost involved in talking to NSP4's q% of the net, assuming q >>> p.
And yet, I fail to grasp why it is not in their best interest to still include that group located in p%, NSP3's customers. Perhaps because they'd rather have the customers?
Perhaps NSP4 believes (likely correctly) that NSP3 will pay NSP4 (or someone peering with NSP4), to ensure that NSP3 customers can talk to the (larger set of) customers served by NSP4?
Just because someone has 30% of the internet, they still have an interest in connecting their 30% of the net to .1% of the net, no?
Or expect the .1% to find a way to them?
Perhaps the geographic cost investment in transit to far-reaching customers is sufficient. Somehow that doesn't answer the question for me.
I'm not talking about transit, I don't think it's necessarily in NSP3's interest to carry NSP4's traffic to NSP1. But NSP3-NSP4 I can see as beneficial, w/ no dalliance.
Clearly this issue is rooted in economics, involving costs (including the labor costs involved in maintaining what would be a large number of peering relationships) as well as the maximization of revenue potential. We have lost prospective customers because of our lack of NAP peering relationships, when the customer hadn't the faintest idea what the concept meant ("asking if we "paired" with anybody). My mental image of the whole picture is that, if NSP4 is going to accept traffic from a West Coast customer of NSP3 and haul it to their East Coast customer, they expect to be able to hand the return traffic back to you on the East Coast, not haul it to a single peering location in one part of the country. This is not transit in the sense that it crosses into other networks, yet it certainly requires the use of national infrastructure. I'm not sure this answers the question fully for me, either.
-alan
"baring my heart for the wrath of all"
May it bring us all closer to cluefullness... :) -- Jim Browning