Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Wed Dec 15 22:37:23 UTC 2010

Jon,

<snip>

>Ratios only make sense between peers.  When you're buying transit, you 
>don't get to enforce ratios and tell your transit providers you're not 
>going to pay (or they're going to pay you) because they're sending you too 
>much traffic.  Back when I ran a dialup network, and our traffic profile 
>was maybe 5:1 input vs output, UUnet would have laughed at me and shut us 
>off if I told them "you're sending us traffic at a 5:1 ratio...because 
>you're sending us so much more traffic than we send you, you're going to 
>have to pay us to deliver that traffic."  Comcast can only get away with 
>that because of their monopoly (captive userbase) and size.

I agree with most of your reply.  In regards to ratios, I firmly believe
they don't make sense between peers as well.  When you operate an eyeball
network, you need
to expect that your users are pulling the data from the content providers.
Your ratios will always be unbalanced with most of your peers.

If ratios are really a concern and you really need to maximize your port
capacity, there are ways to balance this; balance your customer base.  Start
hosting content.  Now, this might not help on private peering interconnects,
but if you peer publicly, this will help you balance (and take advantage of)
your public peering capacity.

Either way, ratios are very 1990s.  As has been mentioned before, it was
more of an excuse not to peer by the monopolistic entities that made up a
big portion of the Internet in the 90s and isn't very relevant today.

Randy