Paul, Yes, that is exactly what we do..;-) Any other providers want to give me a free DS3?????? David Whipple.

-----Original Message----- From: Paul A Vixie [SMTP:paul@vix.com] Sent: Sunday, January 26, 1997 1:25 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: peering charges?

...

Well, my guess would be that if you don't have a DS3 backbone, why would the big guys want to peer with you anyway? If you don't need that much bandwidth (or don't have it) odds are you don't have enough customers for the big guys to want to peer with you.

Chances are that the big guys all have POPs in the little guys' areas, and that there is or could be an exchange point in each such area, and that the big guys' customers will have better access to the little guys' customers if peering is done.

The reasons we don't do this aren't related to network size. There are three reasons: (a) big guy thinks their excrement is odorless and that everybody else ought to have to pay to get access to their perfect network and their spamless customers; (b) big guy wants little guy to pay fair share of WAN costs; and (c) it's a tiny bit harder to "peer" if you're only sending local area routes rather than sending all of them everywhere.

I agree with with the information provider model. Ultimately, entities with attractive content will be selling access to wide area providers, who will sell it to local area providers, who will sell it to customers. This is the old "gatekeeper.dec.com" model extended to fee-based content. I heard that Microsoft was letting providers terminate T3's with them since good access to Microsoft's content is a selling point for an access provider's customer base. Why should such a content provider have to buy peering, or pay wide area telecom costs? On the other hand, right now Microsoft is still effectively buying transit, and at some point they will just charge for access to their content and let other people charge each other for indirect access to that content.

And Microsoft is just the first/largest.