In a message written on Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 03:34:52PM -0800, Seth Mattinen wrote:
My take on this is that settlement free peering only remains free as long as it is beneficial to both sides, i.e. equal amounts of traffic exchanged. If it becomes wildly lopsided in one direction, then it becomes more like paying for transit.
When you have users and no content how can the traffic be equal? When you have content and no users how can the traffic be equal? Ratio is horribly outdated. Cable and DSL providers enforce out of ratio at the edge with technology and policy. My cable modem is 8 down 2 up, yet my traffic profile is supposed to be equal? I can't host any "servers" by my TOS, but aggregated up the ratio is supposed to be 1:1? No one will ever be in ratio compliance with an eyeball dominant network. Ever. Period. It's not possible via technology and TOS. Enforcing it as an eyeball network just forces content providers to aquire eyeballs, e.g. compete with you. That's bad business. But this isn't a technology problem, or a ratio problem. Peering spats like this are ego problems. It's one VP/SVP/CTO/CFO deciding that "my sandbox is more important than your sandbox", or "I'm going to get revenue even if the world hates me for it and I'm going to burn all my bridges in the process." If they actually wanted to equalize the costs, they could do that. Decide on better peering locations, use cold potato routing, locate caching/cdn things inside the other network, etc. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/