Cogent & HE

Jimmy Hess mysidia at gmail.com
Thu Jun 9 12:56:18 UTC 2011


On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 3:39 AM, Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> wrote:
> On (2011-06-09 00:55 -0700), Owen DeLong wrote:

> I look forward for IPv4 to go away, as in future I can have full free
> connectivity through HE to every other shop who all have full free connectivity
> to HE. Something went terribly wrong in IPv4 land, where we're being unfairly
> forced to pay to access other networks through them.

The existence of free IPv6 transit from one peer to another is clearly a
temporary situation;  when IPv6 traffic picks up, expect to see the end of free
transit, or a new rule like  "free transit only to our paying
customers' networks", or
"Pay an extra port fee, get first XX megs transit for free".

It's obvious HE wishes to get positioning as
Tier1 on the IPv6 network.  Once the amount of IPv6 traffic increases,
$$ required for HE to provide transit between free peers will increase, and at
some amount of traffic  free transit will no longer be sustainable, due to
additional network upgrades, ports, etc, required to carry additional transit.

So they either lose massive $$, become a non-profit organization, and get
sufficient donations from peers to fund upgrades,  or at some point, limit
the amount of (or type) of transit that is free, or stop adding peers.


An assumption is that there will be such a thing as a Tier1 on the IPv6 network.
Perhaps, the fact there are ISPs larger than all the others and the IP
protocol suite
tends to form a hierarchical structure logically, BUT

There exists a possibility that no IPv6 network will be able to
achieve transit-free status
through peering;  evidently, it just takes one large arrogant network
operator to demand
everyone else buy transit, in order to prevent any Tier1s  from
completely becoming Tier1

(and ironically -- preventing themselves from being classified Tier1,
due to refusing to peer with HE).

Unless you know... the operational definition of Tier1 is relaxed
greatly to allow for partial
connectivity;  reaching 50% of the networks without transit does not make one
Tier1.

--
-JH




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