Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement

Tue Aug 25 08:07:11 UTC 1998

exodus.net	preference =  5, mail exchanger = postal.exodus.net
> 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.
> 

Actually, if the content provider simply honors MEDs, that should cover most
of the issue.  Then, the long haul is done across the content providers'
backbone anyway.

Owen