Peering versus Transit

Sun Sep 29 22:00:40 UTC 1996

On Sun, 29 Sep 1996, Michael S. Ramsey wrote:

> Typically peers configure their routers so as to keep routes learned via a
> peer internal, and not advertised to other peers. Therefore, you _can_
> dump all of your traffic to one of your peers, but your traffic will not
> come back to you via that same peer, because they are not announcing your
> routes to anyone else. Real transit _requires_ that the transit provider
> advertise your routes to other providers. Nothing less will work.

Correct, but what some providers do is get a transit connection from X
provider. Now sprint, MCI, the whole world can get to them. They now
connect to a NAP and try to get peering, because they are at one nap they
get a few players, but not all. So their solution is to send say all MCI
traffic to MCI and all Sprint traffic to Sprit. Now if you traceroute out
from that provider it will look like they are peering with Sprint and MCI,
but if you traceroute in it will be through their transit provider.  

It is asymmetrical, but say you are hosting a lot of www sites and have
mostly out-going traffic this solution will work and give you 10, or even
100 meg FDDI out, but only the size of your transit pipe in. 

The main problem with is is that A) It is not ethical B) the provider
you are doing this to will figure it out someday and see you in court C)
it is not nice. :-)

Nathan Stratton		  CEO, NetRail, Inc.    Tracking the future today!
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