Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement
At 08:47 PM 08/21/1998 -0700, Mike Leber wrote:
... And any suitably informed party to a peering arrangement like this can simply offer free hosting to search engine crawlers until they are extracting the desired amount cash from their peer via settlements.
Folks, Think very carefully about what happens as traffic increases... Given that the context is the introduction of "settlement-based" peering for traffic imbalance in a shortest-exit world, then all of the various schemes for generation of traffic (web crawlers, backup services, etc) are no problem whatsoever, and may actually been seen as desirable... Background: Imagine a nationwide Internet provider with customer A on the west coast and customer B on the east coast. Customer B sends queries to customer A's server, and receives quite a bit of data in return. (all of this traffic stays on the provider's backbone in this case) Presume for the moment that the provider charges the customers (A&B) on a usage-basis which takes both sending and received traffic levels into consideration. Now, one could charge each of A and B the full cost of the traffic exchanged (which would effectively be "double dipping" and quite profitable :-) but a competitive market makes it far more likely that the rate per traffic measure will be such that A & B together pay the costs associated with their traffic exchange Now, given that A & B are both on the provider's network, everything is fine. When we hypothesize that A is instead connected to a peer network, we don't know whether costs will be recovered. In a shortest- exit world, traffic is quickly exchanged to the original provider's network and hence the costs of transmission to B are almost identical to the case where the A was a customer. Given that there's only one customer (B) now paying for these costs, this presents a potential problem. Customer B expects to pay their fair share of the costs, but doesn't expect to pay a larger portion of the total costs simply because A is connected to another provider. The truth is, there is actually nothing wrong with this situation if the traffic to/from the peer is of the same order of magnitude. To elaborate: a peer provides traffic which must be carried without corresponding sender-side revenue. On the other hand, the peer also allows the Internet provider to provide a similar level of sender-paid traffic which (by nature of being handed off) has very little actual transmission costs. This is why typical peers are overall neutral to cost recovery, and why peers which send far more traffic than received are problematic. There are a few options that have been mentioned to this situation, including the "receiver pays full freight / sending is free" model, the use of something other than shortest-exit routing, and introduction of settlements for such traffic. For purposes of this thread, we're trying to determine if the settlement approach is doomed to failure due to ability to generate additional traffic flows through innovation. Assessment: Presuming that a peer which is a net exporter of traffic begins to address this by encouraging additional traffic from customers to its network, this would result in more sender-paid originating traffic which quickly moves to the peer. Such traffic is (as noted above) quite profitable, as it includes full cost recover but little actual costs due to shortest to the peer. This is actually good for both networks, and us back to an Internet where more traffic is considered a good thing by ISP's at both ends of the connection. /John p.s. The fact that the sender of traffic should be paying some portion of the resulting costs is not a surprise to anyone; many of the content companies that I've spoken to believe they already are paying more as traffic increases, and were quite surprised to find that it doesn't actually make it to the networks which bear the brunt of the traffic carriage. p.p.s. As noted, departure from shortest-exit is also another approach which may provide some answers to this situation, but that's a different topic which deserves its own thread. This message is simply noting that settling for peering traffic is quite viable, despite assertions to the contrary regarding traffic generation. As long as you're billing the senders on your network for increased usage (and handing it off shortest-exit), increased traffic is good thing.
This message is simply noting that settling for peering traffic is quite viable, despite assertions to the contrary regarding traffic generation.
But you're making the critical assumption that the peer is more eager to get the traffic delivered than your customers are to receive it. If we were talking about paying to send spam, you'd be entirely right. But we're really talking about paying to deliver web content, and the jury's still out about that. It may turn out to be the case that providers with a lot of retail customers have to accept expensive web-hosting peers as a cost of retaining the dialup customers. Or it may turn out that providers with a lot of web hosting customers may have to pay for peering to get the connectivity that their customers' advertisers demand. But the days of peering purely based on traffic volume were over before they began, the day an international IP link landed in the US paid entirely by the foreign ISP. That was quite a while ago. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, John Curran wrote:
p.p.s. As noted, departure from shortest-exit is also another approach which may provide some answers to this situation, but that's a different topic which deserves its own thread. This message is simply noting that settling for peering traffic is quite viable, despite assertions to the contrary regarding traffic generation. As long as you're billing the senders on your network for increased usage (and handing it off shortest-exit), increased traffic is good thing.
Nothing you've said refutes the fact that transaction based settlements encourages waste. You've effectively pointed out that when properly billed it can be a pass through situation for the networks and only web hosting clients will suffer the brunt of the waste. The ability to generate waste in this system legitimately and non fraudulently is purely limited by your creativity. The use of smurfs as an example (non legitimate and fraudlent) is an easy to knock down straw man. A large of amount of legitimate and non fraudulent traffic, orders of magnitude larger than existing traffic flows, in any quantity desired, can be generated in either direction to achieve whatever revenue flow you want. This in effectively provides networks the open ended ability to extract cash from compeititors web hosting customers. In fact it could result in the situation where, for the same amount of actual sales online, it is more expensive to host at network A than network B because network B happens to have a large net index project that indexes content on everybody ELSES network. Don't like "net indexing"? Use any other suitable traffic generating application, there are plenty. Mike. +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 408 282 1540 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting & Co-location Fax 408 971 3340 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Mike Leber wrote:
This in effectively provides networks the open ended ability to extract cash from compeititors web hosting customers.
Err, typo. That should be: This effectively provides networks the open ended ability to extract cash from competitors web hosting customers. +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 408 282 1540 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting & Co-location Fax 408 971 3340 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
(This message assumes Exodus will lose their peering arangement with BBN and I'll either not have routes to Exodus through BBN or they will be worse than they were before) My problem is we purchase transit from BBN. Why should I renew my contract with BBN when I can get better connectivity from someone else? If I stay with BBN how do explain why I did when their connectivity has been degraded? They'll start leaving me for providers with better connectivity. On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, John Curran wrote:
At 08:47 PM 08/21/1998 -0700, Mike Leber wrote:
... And any suitably informed party to a peering arrangement like this can simply offer free hosting to search engine crawlers until they are extracting the desired amount cash from their peer via settlements.
Folks,
Think very carefully about what happens as traffic increases...
Given that the context is the introduction of "settlement-based" peering for traffic imbalance in a shortest-exit world, then all of the various schemes for generation of traffic (web crawlers, backup services, etc) are no problem whatsoever, and may actually been seen as desirable...
Background:
Imagine a nationwide Internet provider with customer A on the west coast and customer B on the east coast. Customer B sends queries to customer A's server, and receives quite a bit of data in return. (all of this traffic stays on the provider's backbone in this case) Presume for the moment that the provider charges the customers (A&B) on a usage-basis which takes both sending and received traffic levels into consideration. Now, one could charge each of A and B the full cost of the traffic exchanged (which would effectively be "double dipping" and quite profitable :-) but a competitive market makes it far more likely that the rate per traffic measure will be such that A & B together pay the costs associated with their traffic exchange
Now, given that A & B are both on the provider's network, everything is fine. When we hypothesize that A is instead connected to a peer network, we don't know whether costs will be recovered. In a shortest- exit world, traffic is quickly exchanged to the original provider's network and hence the costs of transmission to B are almost identical to the case where the A was a customer. Given that there's only one customer (B) now paying for these costs, this presents a potential problem. Customer B expects to pay their fair share of the costs, but doesn't expect to pay a larger portion of the total costs simply because A is connected to another provider.
The truth is, there is actually nothing wrong with this situation if the traffic to/from the peer is of the same order of magnitude. To elaborate: a peer provides traffic which must be carried without corresponding sender-side revenue. On the other hand, the peer also allows the Internet provider to provide a similar level of sender-paid traffic which (by nature of being handed off) has very little actual transmission costs. This is why typical peers are overall neutral to cost recovery, and why peers which send far more traffic than received are problematic.
There are a few options that have been mentioned to this situation, including the "receiver pays full freight / sending is free" model, the use of something other than shortest-exit routing, and introduction of settlements for such traffic. For purposes of this thread, we're trying to determine if the settlement approach is doomed to failure due to ability to generate additional traffic flows through innovation.
Assessment:
Presuming that a peer which is a net exporter of traffic begins to address this by encouraging additional traffic from customers to its network, this would result in more sender-paid originating traffic which quickly moves to the peer. Such traffic is (as noted above) quite profitable, as it includes full cost recover but little actual costs due to shortest to the peer. This is actually good for both networks, and us back to an Internet where more traffic is considered a good thing by ISP's at both ends of the connection.
/John
p.s. The fact that the sender of traffic should be paying some portion of the resulting costs is not a surprise to anyone; many of the content companies that I've spoken to believe they already are paying more as traffic increases, and were quite surprised to find that it doesn't actually make it to the networks which bear the brunt of the traffic carriage.
p.p.s. As noted, departure from shortest-exit is also another approach which may provide some answers to this situation, but that's a different topic which deserves its own thread. This message is simply noting that settling for peering traffic is quite viable, despite assertions to the contrary regarding traffic generation. As long as you're billing the senders on your network for increased usage (and handing it off shortest-exit), increased traffic is good thing.
-- Tracy Snell (312) 588-2900 President, EnterAct, L.L.C. http://www.enteract.com tjs@enteract.com
On Mon, Aug 24, 1998 at 10:13:43PM -0500, Tracy J. Snell wrote:
(This message assumes Exodus will lose their peering arangement with BBN and I'll either not have routes to Exodus through BBN or they will be worse than they were before)
My problem is we purchase transit from BBN. Why should I renew my contract with BBN when I can get better connectivity from someone else? If I stay with BBN how do explain why I did when their connectivity has been degraded? They'll start leaving me for providers with better connectivity.
That has been exactly my point. You bought that transit expecting BBN to get you to the entire IP-connected world where contiguous connectivity is *possible*. Now BBN is saying "well, all except this one place, because we don't like the cost of carrying the traffic you requested (but which you had assumed you already paid them to carry)". This is why anything other than open, unrestricted peering is bogus. People say "well, you will just show up in one place and dump everything there, effectively charging everyone else for your costs". That's bogus as well, and here's why: 1. You can't control quality on someone ELSE's infrastructure. This drives you to install your own circuits to multiple points across the country, because the longer you hold onto the packets the better your ability to insure quality. 2. By installing circuits you gain access to additional markets (cities). This is a real, honest-to-God tangible benefit which offsets the cost. It also allows entirely-on-net services to be sold which again, goes back to point (1) (QOS). Bottom line: If you buy a transit connection, you're expecting TRANSIT. If a backbone provider DELIBERATELY interferes with that transit by cutting off people who refuse to pay for something they've already been compensated for, and for a flow which their customers REQUESTED, the proper step for their customers to take, IMHO, is to drop their contract into the nearest paper shredder and send back the chips. -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin http://www.mcs.net/ | T1's from $600 monthly / All Lines K56Flex/DOV | NEW! Corporate ISDN Prices dropped by up to 50%! Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| EXCLUSIVE NEW FEATURE ON ALL PERSONAL ACCOUNTS Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | *SPAMBLOCK* Technology now included at no cost
participants (5)
-
John Curran -
johnl＠iecc.com -
Karl Denninger -
Mike Leber -
Tracy J. Snell