Sprint v. Cogent, some clarity & facts

Mon Nov 3 15:24:27 UTC 2008

David Schwartz wrote:
> Your customers pay you to carry their traffic across your network between them and the next network in the line. There is no reason anyone else should compensate you for doing this.
>   

What it all comes down to is that the majority of eyeballs are on 
"residential" connections that are relatively expensive to provide but 
for which are sold at a relatively low price (often 1/10th as much per 
megabit of capacity).  Those eyeball ISPs cannot or will not charge 
their customers the full cost of "receiving" traffic so they want money 
from the more profitable content ISPs "sending" the traffic to offset 
their losses.

This is also one of the reasons eyeball ISPs want to stamp out P2P: both 
ends of the connections are on unprofitable lines and there is _nobody_ 
paying for the traffic.  Just follow the money.

S