local_preference for transit traffic?

Matthew Petach mpetach at netflight.com
Sat Dec 17 16:32:03 UTC 2011


On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Mark Tinka <mtinka at globaltransit.net> wrote:
> On Friday, December 16, 2011 05:02:33 AM Joe Malcolm wrote:
>
>> Once upon a time, UUNET did the opposite by setting
>> origin to unknown for peer routes, in an attempt to
>> prefer customer routes over peer routes. We moved to
>> local preference shortly thereafter as it became clear
>> this was "changing" the routes in some meaningful way;
>> if a customer was multihomed to us and another provider,
>> this might affect path selection.
>
> This raises an interesting question we've dealt with many a
> time in our network - outside of situations mandated by
> governments or some such, are ISP's happy to peer with their
> customers (where "peer" = settlement-free exchanging of
> routes/traffic across public interconnects while "customers"
> = servicing a commercial IP Transit contract)?
>
> Mark.

I've been able to negotiate peering+transit relationships
with providers, but only by threat of total revenue loss;
ie "we currently pay you $x million/year; we want your
on-net routes as settlement-free routes, and will continue
to pay for off-net transit traffic.  Otherwise, we will be
transferring all that revenue to your competitor, X"
This tends to be effective only for content providers,
though, where the outbound traffic dominates,
and you don't care if the inbound bits are coming
over the "pay for" pipe vs the "settlement free" pipe.
If you're an inbound-heavy shop, though, this won't really
buy you much benefit.  (And, if the revenue
point isn't in the $x millions/year for the transit
provider, they're more likely to just shrug and say
"too much hassle...please, go be a headache
for our competitor" rather than configuring a
dual relationship like that--so it really only works
for higher-volume relationships.)

Matt




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