Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement

Tue Aug 25 00:19:58 UTC 1998

John Curran wrote:
> 
> Customers who receive traffic currently bear some of the costs
> and the sending customer bears some of the costs.  In the case
> of an off-net sender with shortest-exit routing and no offsetting
> traffic in the other direction, the receiving customer ends up
> bearing all of the costs.

I guess 'all the cost' means most of the cost, and 'no offsetting traffic'
means 'not much offsetting traffic'.

However, is the real problem here the traffic assymetry, or the fact that
all of the traffic is coming from one geographic location?

If it is the former, then there isn't much of a solution except to merge
with a network that sucks a huge amount of traffic.  However, if it is the
latter, then wouldn't content distribution fix it?  I know many web farms
offer distributed servers to their customers as a type of premium service. 
However, since in this case it benefits all parties involved, it seems to me
that it might make sense to offer this service to huge web sites at little
or no additional cost.

Alec

-- 
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
|Alec H. Peterson - ahp at hilander.com  | Lead Network Architect           |
|http://www.hilander.com              | Erols Internet - an RCN Company  |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+