Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid,

Fri Sep 17 14:49:17 UTC 2010

> On 9/16/2010 2:28 PM, sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:
> >
> > If you want control: Don't buy the cheapest commodity product.
> 
> +1

-1

> Next we'll be arguing that akamai nodes are evil because they can have 
> better service levels than other sites. The p2p guys are also getting 
> special treatment, as they can grab files faster than the direct 
> download guy. Oh, and provider met google's bandwidth requirements for 
> peering, so their peering with google gives better service to google 
> than yahoo/hotmail; which was unfair to the provider who didn't meet the 
> requirements and has to go the long way around. :P
> 
> Provider may also have met ll's requirements, so peering accepted there, 
> and here come the better netflix streams. Of course, anywhere a provider 
> has a direct peer, they'll want to prioritize that traffic over any other.
> 
> True net-neutrality means no provider can have a better service than 
> another. This totally screws with private peering and the variety of 
> requirements, as well as special services (such as akamai nodes). Many 
> of these cases aren't about saturation, but better connectivity between 
> content provider and ISP. Adding money or QOS to the equation is just 
> icing on the cake.

There are some excellent points in this, but I disagree as to the
conclusions you seem to be drawing.

One could look at peering as an opportunity to do some backdoor
prioritization, and there's some legitimacy to that fear.

My basic expectation as a customer is that you can provide me with
some level of service.  Since most service providers are unwilling to
actually commit to a level of service, I might take the numbers
attached to the service tier you sold me.

So if I'm now downloading my latest FreeBSD via BitTorrent, my basic
expectation is ultimately that I'll get fair treatment.

What's "fair treatment" though?

I think at the end of the day, it means that I've got to have reasonable
access to the Internet.  That means that if I can get packets in and out
of your transit without fuss, that's probably good enough.  If you've
short-circuited things with peering that gives me faster access, that's
great too.  However, if your transit is 100% saturated for 20% of the
day, every day, that's NOT good enough.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.