Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning Comcast's Actions

Mon Nov 29 23:59:57 UTC 2010

In a message written on Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 03:34:52PM -0800, Seth Mattinen wrote:
> My take on this is that settlement free peering only remains free as
> long as it is beneficial to both sides, i.e. equal amounts of traffic
> exchanged. If it becomes wildly lopsided in one direction, then it
> becomes more like paying for transit.

When you have users and no content how can the traffic be equal?

When you have content and no users how can the traffic be equal?

Ratio is horribly outdated.  Cable and DSL providers enforce out
of ratio at the edge with technology and policy.  My cable modem
is 8 down 2 up, yet my traffic profile is supposed to be equal?  I
can't host any "servers" by my TOS, but aggregated up the ratio is
supposed to be 1:1?

No one will ever be in ratio compliance with an eyeball dominant
network.  Ever.   Period.  It's not possible via technology and
TOS.  Enforcing it as an eyeball network just forces content providers
to aquire eyeballs, e.g. compete with you.  That's bad business.

But this isn't a technology problem, or a ratio problem.  Peering
spats like this are ego problems.  It's one VP/SVP/CTO/CFO deciding
that "my sandbox is more important than your sandbox", or "I'm going
to get revenue even if the world hates me for it and I'm going to
burn all my bridges in the process."  If they actually wanted to
equalize the costs, they could do that.  Decide on better peering
locations, use cold potato routing, locate caching/cdn things inside
the other network, etc.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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