exodus.net preference = 5, mail exchanger = postal.exodus.net

John Curran wrote:

...

Customers who receive traffic currently bear some of the costs and the sending customer bears some of the costs. In the case of an off-net sender with shortest-exit routing and no offsetting traffic in the other direction, the receiving customer ends up bearing all of the costs.

I guess 'all the cost' means most of the cost, and 'no offsetting traffic' means 'not much offsetting traffic'.

However, is the real problem here the traffic assymetry, or the fact that all of the traffic is coming from one geographic location?

If it is the former, then there isn't much of a solution except to merge with a network that sucks a huge amount of traffic. However, if it is the latter, then wouldn't content distribution fix it? I know many web farms offer distributed servers to their customers as a type of premium service. However, since in this case it benefits all parties involved, it seems to me that it might make sense to offer this service to huge web sites at little or no additional cost.

Actually, if the content provider simply honors MEDs, that should cover most of the issue. Then, the long haul is done across the content providers' backbone anyway. Owen