Perhaps the best solution here is for BBN to purchase Exodus.
You mean GTE...
On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Michael Dillon wrote:
However, there is a more general issue here. If a company primarily hosts websites, then their traffic will be asymmetric with many more bytes going out than coming in. They must engineer their network to handle this asymmetry and any transit providers they have must also do so. Traditionally, peering only occurred between providers with a national network with at least 4 points of contact, spread out geographically. This requirement is so that each provider carries a roughly equal load of the traffic across expensive national longhaul circuits. It is this balanced transit load that makes them peers.
Lets not forget here that shortly after GTE picked up BBN, they also picked up Genuity. Genuity still pretty much exists as an independant entity. So when that is taken into account, GTE ALSO does web hosting.. They just seperate the traffic off from the "BBN" traffic.
In the case of a web hosting company, the bulk of the traffic is outgoing and if they do the standard shortest-exit routing with their peers, then the peer will be carrying a much larger transit load than the webhosting company. Of course, this could be solved by both parties doing longest-exit which places the largest transit load on the webhosting provider. But there is more.
When the webhosting network touches down at only a few exchange points to peer with a provider who has an extensive network you will have a situation in which the peer is providing regional transit for free and must engineer their regional networks to deal with an asymmetric traffic pattern. For instance, if a webhosting provider touches down at San Jose, Chicago, DC and Dallas then they appear to meet the eligibility requirements for peering. But these peers end up providing full transit from Boston to DC, LA to San Jose, Denver to Dallas, and St. Louis to Chicago. This arises because one provider hosts lots of equipment close to an exchange point and the other provider interconnects many POPs in many cities.
When you consider a web hosting company, often there are not the resources to transit traffic to the best exit. Many companies buy transit from one or more companies anyhow to be sure that they have maximum reachability. If, for example, a company buys transit from MCI and uses that to reach BBN, than it will have an impact on the traffic ratios for the BBN/MCI interconnects. If enough similar companies take MCI to get to BBN then it is entirely possible that the BBN/MCI interconnect will become highly asymetric. So takeing into account what just happened with Exodus, does this mean that BBN would try to force MCI to buy transit from BBN? This only goes so far before the whole thing breaks down. Granted that the above is somewhat extreme example but it is most certainly possible. The whole point behind private interconnects is to get traffic to the destination with as few intermediary hops as possible and to be able to better control congestion and loss between the networks. If BBN's customers have trouble getting to certain popular sites, they're going to complain to BBN. If the hosting company's customers can't be accessed from certain sites, they're going to complain to the hosting company. This means that both companies tech support and operations centers get additional calls, additional work, and additional headaches in trying to deal with traffic levels of some third party. In many ways, its the third party that ultimately suffers as they try to deal with both companies to resolve the issues. IMO, asymetry is not a valid requirement for a private interconnect. NOT having the interconnect hurts both companies. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wayne Bouchard GlobalCenter web@globalcenter.net Network Engineer (602) 416-6422 800-373-2499 x6422 FAX: (602) 416-9422 http://www.globalcenter.net ----------------------------------------------------------------------