Ok, my turn to weigh in on this. :) First, can we stipulate that the "big players" have to peer somewhere? As I see it, there are two extremes: 1) a mesh of point-to-point circuits between sites, (SONET, dark fiber, metro-gigE, etc.) 2) common colocation with local private links between routers On the whole, option 2 seems easier to manage and potentially less expensive. Here's why: - There can be problems getting circuits between carriers. I once heard from an engineer at one carrier-owned ISP that a private peering circuit to another carrier-owned ISP had been on order for over a year, because each carriers refused to allow the other to carry the traffic on its fiber. - It should cost less to bring a few large circuits into a central facility and use the colocated router to multiplex the cheap local peering circuits, than to provision a bunch of smaller metro circuits. - It's much quicker to run fiber across a room than get a circuit from any Telco. This makes additions and changes much easier. Sure, a carrier-owned ISP likely can get ciruits into the colo more easily, but it's not that expensive any more for others to get in. There are a bunch of new companies building carrier infrastructure and trying to sell cheap metro high-speed circuits into popular buildings (I worked for one until recently), and dark fiber is often available for even less. As for the political question of peering policies, I won't get into that except to say that it seems an orthogonal issue to me. Just my $.02, Steve