Peering versus Transit

William Allen Simpson wsimpson at greendragon.com
Mon Sep 30 15:31:45 UTC 1996


Thank you for the beginnings of a more focused discussion on these hard
issues!

I particularly thank Bill Woodcock for a much more thorough treatise with
diagrams which elucidates the major issues.  I am convinced that his
argument is substantially correct.  The limitation on interconnection
is both a technical and socially undesirable end.

Sean Doran advanced some thoughtful solutions for these problems
(although it took more than one reading for me to understand).

So, given that the current policies of large providers promote network
congestion, poor topology engineering, and discourage competition, what
policies should we create to fix this problem?  Wouldn't XP policies
more in line with those of CIX be to everyone's advantage?

As Sanjay Dani correctly states, "if these issues are not resolved within
the ISP community it won't be too long before courts force the issues."

What technology do we need to implement these better policies?  Is
expanding BGP/IDRP for Sean's AS metric suggestion already being done?

Another issue that was raised was the cost of exchanging bilateral routes
with more ISPs at an XP, and inability to trust the small ISPs to
properly configure.  In reality, we have seen that even large ISPs are
badly configured from time to time, and therefore the "smallness" is a
bogus point, although the trust issue remains.

Wouldn't that be solved by having each ISP peer with the XP instead of
every other ISP, reducing from N**2 to N?  Cannot the ISPs trust the XP
to be properly configured?  Isn't this what is already done with the RA
project?

WSimpson at UMich.edu
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BSimpson at MorningStar.com
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