On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Rick Astley <jnanog@gmail.com> wrote: [...]
It would be sort of the same concept of my grandmother calling my cell phone yet we both need to pay for our individual phone lines to at least reach the carrier tasked with connecting our call. Even if my grandmother calls a business, that business have phone lines they pay for. Technically this would be double dipping but it's been the norm for a very long time.
Hi Rick, It's slightly worse than that. Allow me to expand your metaphor just a little bit. You pay for a phone connection to provider X. Your grandmother pays for a connection to provider Y. The connection between provider X and provider Y is handled by long-distance carrier Z. Provider X decides they don't like carrier Z, and won't add more capacity with carrier Z. Your grandmother tries to call you; but due to the lack of capacity between carrier Z and provider X, she gets an "all circuits are busy" message over and over again. Provider X tells provider Y that if wants to get its calls through, it will have to pay additional $$s *beyond* what it already pays to carrier Z, in order to connect to provider X so that those calls can go through. Provider Y is concerned that your poor grandmother may have a stroke due to all the stress and worry that she is undergoing, due to not being able to reach you on the telephone. So, with a heavy heart, they agree to pay provider X to connect additional circuits to provider Y, at a much higher cost. To avoid having to go bankrupt paying those additional costs, provider Y has to raise the cost for your poor grandmother's phone service. In order to pay the increased costs, she is forced to go without afternoon tea on weekends. And there is much sadness in the universe. That's where we are today. The content providers and the eyeball networks used to be just fine being connected through intermediate carriers. But now the eyeball networks are refusing to increase capacity with the intermediate carriers, telling content providers that they either need to pay additional money to connect directly to the eyeball networks, or deal with congestion ("all circuits busy" recordings for their customers). Nobody's asking for a free ride (well, other than $low_cost_transit_carrier, but I'm leaving them out of this discussion)--what they're objecting to is having to pay for their upstream transit circuits, and then *also pay additional money to bypass congestion, and talk to specific eyeball networks.* Hopefully that clarifies the situation a bit more. ^_^ Thanks! Matt