Why do some providers require IPv6 /64 PA space to have public whois?

Sun Dec 9 22:40:28 UTC 2012

On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:
> The vast majority of AS-AS boundaries on the Internet are settlement free peering.  I guess that makes the Internet a scam.
>
> As for the costs involved, "free" is a relative term.  Most people think of peering as "free" because there is zero marginal cost.  Kinda.  Obviously if you think of your 10G IX port as a sunk cost, pushing 11 Gbps over it is not 'free' as you have to upgrade.  But again, most people understand what is meant.
>
> Bigger waves & bigger routers are not due to peering, they are due to customer traffic - you know, the thing ISPs sell.  Put another way, this is a Good Thing (tm).  Or at least it should be.  Unless, of course, you are trying to convince us all that selling too many units of your primary product is somehow bad.
>
> Peering allows you, in most cases, to lower the Cost Of Goods Sold on that product.  Again, usually a Good Thing (tm).  Unless you are again trying to convince us all that selling at a higher margin (we'll ignore the lower latency & better overall experience) is somehow bad.

The quote was tongue-in-cheek, of course. I don't agree that "most
people understand what is meant". I can't count the number of
companies that unnecessarily get waves to exchanges and colocate there
because they think peering there will reduce their costs, when it does
not.

I was not trying to argue that more traffic is bad. I'm just trying to
argue that there are certain (often neglected) costs that you would
only have with peering that you could avoid when not peering, and that
it's more than just the exchange port.

Also, it's a different topic, but I really don't think "tier 3s"
(sigh) peering on public exchanges increases quality generally. It
(usually) does decrease latency, but there is generally a lack of
redundancy in most peering setups that is glaring when there is a
failure somewhere. Of course, if you're a very competent network
operator, you can have lots of redundancy for your peering, both at
the edge and internally (in terms of doing the traffic engineering
needed when you have lots of different paths traffic can take), but
I'd say this is not the sort of setup a standard regional operator
would have.

-- 
Darius Jahandarie