At 11:47 PM 5/10/96, Matthew Kaufman wrote:

I understand that nationwide providers don't want to provide me with "free transit", so, I suggest the following solutions (directed at those nationwide providers who don't peer with me, and networks like mine):

1. Peer with me anyway, but don't accept any of my routes into your network... that allows me to do the same thing I would do if I were nationwide and doing quickest-exit (feed all traffic destined for your nationwide network into it at the west coast) without giving me the benefit of the return path... this is no more asymmetric than we've got now, and at least accelerates the one direction. I've got a transit provider, so I'm going to hand you the very same packets eventually... you might as well take them off my hands at the interconnect, rather than have them presented to you by my transit provider.

Interesting... it does avoid the transit issue, so it's worth considering to some extent. I'll note that the current west-coast interconnects are not exactly lacking traffic so there may be cases where it may not be advisable to peer anyway if adds more traffic to the interconnect.

2. Even better, accept my routes into your network but only use them within region... I know this isn't nearly as easy as #1, so I don't expect it to happen, but it would be a significant performance benefit for the local traffic your customers in the region are generating which is headed towards me. Once outside the region, of course, you ignore the direct routes from me and just give them to my transit provider.

It becomes very entertaining to scale the above model (although it does provide an excuse to use nearly every BGP routing feature in IOS. :-) /John