Peering Policies and Route Servers
Enke Chen
enke at mci.net
Tue Apr 30 14:49:02 UTC 1996
Hi, all:
Let me add my humble opnions on engineering issues reagarding peering:
(1) There is a snowball effect for interconnects. If an organization
could simply connect to an interconnect and gain global
connectivity without paying for transit, why not? Can you
imagine an interconnect with 500 organizations?
Unrestricted peering policy would accelerate rolling of the
snowball, and lead to the collapse of an interconnect. In order
for Internet to survive, this snowball effect got to stop.
(2) There is no connectivity gain for a national provider to peer
with a single-attached organizaiton as all these organizations have
transit providers that are present at multiple interconnects.
(3) There is a huge investment involved to build a national backbone.
Many providers currently do "hot-potato" routing (closed-exit)
because of this cost. Peering with a single-attached organization
would require much more backbone investment as traffic to this
organization needs to be carried across the backbone, while the
cost for this single-attached organization would be small (one
DS3 to an interconnect).
Regarding the RS (I have many friends there, and they have done many
good work), let me echo the fundamental issues that Steve Heimlich
has pointed out, would you rather have your peering policy enforced by
yourself or by a third party? Would you rather develop a dependency
on a third party (which may not be there a few years down the road)
to deliver the critical service or depend on yourself?
-- Enke (speaking only for myself)
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