On Sun, 14 January 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:

...

... The imbalance issue has come up a few more times with other providers such as PSI, Abovenet and others.

To the best of my knowledge, AboveNet has never insisted on any particular traffic balance with any of our peers. Send to us 10:1, 1:10, 1:1, whatever. Any traffic coming or going over a peering connection is to or from one of AboveNet's customers, which means we're paid (by that customer) to deliver it. (Any other policy amounts to wanting to be paid twice for the same packet.)

There are always two sides to any peering exchange. Abovenet may not insist on any particular traffic balance, but their peers may. So peering requirements may affect a provider because it is on the insister side or the insistee side. Abovenet is a nice example of this, simply because they are one of the few providers still publishing traffic statistics. (This is a good thing). If you look at Abovenet's traffic graphs, you'll notice Abovenet has a wide variety of traffic balances with different providers. Some in Abovenet's favor (such as 3:1 with Sprint, 5:1 with Teleglobe) and some in the other provider's favor (such as 1:3 with Exodus). And a whole bunch of providers somewhere in between. UUNET isn't listed, so I don't know what that traffic balance looks like. It will be interesting to see what happens in 12 months when UUNET retroactively applies their policy to existing private interconnections. What if you are a web hosting company with data centers in a few large cities (chi, dal, la, nyc, sf) and don't meet UUNET's requirement to be located in 15 US states. What if you are a major Canadian provider with POPs in every province from coast to coast, but only a few locations across the border in the USA. What if you are a major South American or African provider covering those entire continents, but with little presence in UUNET's strongholds of US, Europe and Asia. One problem with all these peering policies is different providers have different strengths. I think interconnection agreements should be based on the point of interconnection. When you delve too much in how the internals of other providers' networks work, I think you are always going to run into problems. I think it is best to view other provider's networks as a black box.