We have a transit connection here _and_ a connection to mae-west. The mae-west connection's best use is to get traffic to and from other medium-sized regional providers without visiting either our or their transit provider (often different ones, so we're saving a lot of hops and potential congestion points here) There's also those nationwide providers (like UUnet) who apparently find it in their best interest to peer with regional networks to take advantage of the increased performance that parties on both sides get when it happens. I think this makes for a lot of happy customers on both sides of the situation, because any increase in performance or reliability between my network and the nationwide network's customers translates into fewer complaints by those customers that "the net's broken today". Sprint had an engineer on the phone with our operations center just a couple days ago, trying to resolve a complaint originating with a Sprint customer that our network was unreachable... had Sprint been peering with us, instead of relying exclusively on our transit provider who happened to be having an outage, Sprint would have had a happier customer and that Sprint engineer wouldn't have had to make that phone call. Last I checked, paying a skilled NOC person for a few hours could pay for months worth of the bandwidth that we'd "get for free" if Sprint peered with us at just a single coast. The unfortunate thing is when regional providers turn into national providers and lose their incentive to peer with other regionals (eg. formerly-BARRNet, who isn't interested in peering with me because I'm only on one coast, even though, with quickest-exit, all the traffic between the west coast part of BBN Planet and our network would be crossing the west-coast interconnect only... seems silly for me to have to go buy a router and a DS3 to the east coast just so regional traffic can stay local and avoid the extra hops imposed by us each using our transit providers) 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. 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. Meanwhile, the interconnect is still mighty useful for getting traffic around the area, so even without peering with everybody who's there, we see a lot of performance gains that our customers (and the customers of the other networks) appreciate. There's no way we can pick up all of the regional business, and I think most of our competition knows that they're in the same situation, and that's what makes regional peering work. -matthew kaufman matthew@scruz.net Original message <199605110144.VAA26028@neteng.nis.newscorp.com> From: Dave Curado <dcurado@neteng.nis.newscorp.com> Date: May 10, 21:44 Subject: Re: Worldly Thoughts

Or, possible some small providers buy a multi-megabit circuit from a large provider who gives them transit. The small provider then connects at a single NAP and picks up bilateral peering sessions with a bunch of people there. The result is offloading traffic from their "transit link", which stands a good chance of being priced as a "burstable" link. (pay for what you use) That gives the small provider an economic incentive to operate in this manner.

No comment on whether this is a good idea or bad, but I understand the thinking.

davec

-- End of excerpt from Dave Curado