Public Works Peering

Thu Oct 6 19:06:36 UTC 2005

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, J. Oquendo wrote:

> Now that I had time to marinate weird ideas even further, this is how my
> previous idea `could` work for all parties. Of course those making
> financial decisions would likely hate this idea since it would somehow
> manage to "hurt" their business in their eyes...
>
> States (or countries) would create a massive public NAP which would be
> peered in each state. Guaranteed not to go down. Well 99.99999% (snicker)
> guaranteed not to falter. This network would be funded by taxpayer dollars
> and anyone wanting to peer would pay solely enough to maintain this NAP.

A few models to look at (based mostly on things I've heard rather than 
studying closely, so corrections are welcome):

Saudi Arabia -- Government run monopoly transit provider.  Interconnects 
the licensed ISPs locally and provides international transit and content 
filtering.

India -- Government imposed manditory MLPA with paid settlements. 
Designed to convince VSNL (the monopoly international transit provider) to 
announce all their routes to all peers, but not having the desired effect.

Various other places -- Non-government MLPAs.  Industry run exchanges, 
with an MLPA as a condition for participating.  Often done through route 
servers.  I think Hong Kong is the biggest example of this, with the route 
server announcing 13,000 routes.  Really common in smaller exchanges in 
areas where there's huge (orders of magnitude) difference between transit 
and peering costs.

There are also a few exchanges without route servers, but where peering 
negotiation gets done on mailing lists readable by the other members, 
which looks very strange to my American eyes.

The non-government MLPAs seem to work reasonably well in some places. 
The two examples of Government regulation above don't appear to have led 
to significantly lower prices, usually the goal of peering.  US networks 
tend not to like MLPAs because it reduces control, and do seem to be good 
at keeping prices down in the major metropolitan areas, so it's possible 
US peering coordinators are at least doing things in one of the possible 
right ways.

-Steve