Provider credibility - does it matter? was Re: Inter-provider relations

Fri Oct 25 03:36:55 UTC 1996

Karl Denninger  <karl at Mcs.Net> wrote:

>Any provider that does not recognize the value of bilateral, no-settlement
>peering anywhere that its cost-effective for both parties (ie: if you have
>traffic destined for me, get it on MY network where I'm being paid to
>carry it and let ME figure the rest out!) deserves what they get.

Zero-settlement peerings open to anyone are demonstrably amount to
subsidies from large peers to small.

That already was beaten to death.  However, i repeat the argument:

				 Big Provider
Customer A ---[POP] ------------- 1000 miles -----------[POP]
							  |
							 IXP
							  |
			  Customer B ------[POP]-1 mile-[POP]
					     Small Provider

When customers A and B talk Big Provider pays to get them through
1000 miles.  Small Provider pays for 1 mile.

Note that i didn't even talk about less measurabe, but way too
more important things like hosting of information suppliers.
Say, Big Provider connects 1000 web sites; Small Provider hosts
1 site -- benefit from peering in terms of Web site diversity to
the Big Provider's customers is 0.1%.  To Small Provider's
customers the benefit of peering is 99.9%.

Zero-settlements work only when peers are of comparable size.
Any attempt to extort pressure to force it upon anyone simply
causes large folks to flee.

--vadim