On Mon, Oct 2, 2023, 12:14 Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:


On 10/2/23 20:58, Tim Burke wrote:

> Hurricane has been doing the same thing lately... but their schtick is to say that "we are seeing a significant amount of hops in your AS path and wanted to know if you are open to resolve this issue".

I get what HE are trying to do here, as I am sure all of us do.

The potential fallout is a declining relationship with their existing
customers that bring other downstream ISP's behind them. Contacting
those downstream ISP's to "resolve this issue" puts them at odds with
their existing customers who bring those customers in already.

There is a chance they dilute their income because, well, smaller ISP's
will not be keen to pay the higher transit fees their upstreams pay to
HE. Which means that HE are more willing to be closer to eyeballs than
they are maximizing margins.

Huh?

In all my decades of time in the network industry, I have never seen a case where a smaller transit contract had lower per mbit cost than a larger volume contract.

I would expect that HE would make *more* money off 10 smaller customer transit contracts than one big tier 3 wholesaler transit contract.

It seems like a win-win for HE:
more customer revenue *and* shorter hop-count paths they can advertise to the rest of the world.

Is the loss of customer trust worth the transit-free glory?

When it's offset by more revenue?

Sure seems like it.   ;)


Mark.

Matt