Peering Policies and Route Servers

Mon Apr 29 17:14:09 UTC 1996

There are two good reasons to peer only with backbones of
comparable size:

1) technical -- this allows to do hot-potato routing with minimal
   resulting delay assymetry

2) economical -- peering at IXP is favouring smaller folks in
   cost/benefit game.  For a large ISP the percentage of additional
   destinations the small ISP offers is smaller, and so is the
   benefit of peering.  ANd extra peerings are far from "free".
  They produce extra paths which need to be processed by routers,
   and so translate in shorter lifetime of the equipment -- which
   means very real money. It also reduces effectiveness of
   aggregation and increases risk of catastrophic failures (large
   ISPs spend significant part of engineering resources and practice
   rather strict controls on configuration process to ensure sanity
   of routing; they also have to _trust_ each other.  Most of garbadge
   in routing tables comes from small ISPs, and is usually hard to
   fix (no 24hr NOC etc).

So the "three IXPs" limitation is specifically designed to ensure
equality of sizes (to a some extent), other provisions of BLIAs
("blia" is a common profanity in Russian, btw :) include 24hr NOC etc.

Thus, far from being anti-competitive restrictions those policies only
serve to level the playing field -- as players who skip investment
in infrastructure, engineering and operations would get unfair advantage
otherwise.

No sane NSP would refuse peering with a new nationwide DS-3 backbone --
providing that it is something more than hot air.  The plank is going
to be raised to OC-3 pretty soon, though....

--vadim