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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