different thinking on exchanging traffic
Randy Bush
randy at psg.com
Thu Jun 4 05:37:00 UTC 1998
thanks for thinking and writing it down.
> I think there are actually a couple of different traffic measurements
> of interest. traffic volume, traffic elasticity, and traffic usability.
>
> Traffic volume is fairly simple, but also mostly useless. Measure the
> total traffic exchange through the local exchange point (e.g. peak 2Mbps
> in St. Louis) and that is a definition of traffic exchanged by the local
> ISPs that isn't going across transit lines to upstream providers. Harder
> to measure is how 'local' any of the ISPs actually are. In the st. louis
> case, all of the ISPs operate in at least two states, and two of them operate
> in more than two states. None of them, as far as I know, have tried
> to break up their routing into geographic regions.
>
> Traffic elasticity is an interesting issue. How much traffic is
> being exchanged, which wouldn't otherwise be exchanged? In other words
> is the existance of the local exchange point actually causing more
> traffic to be generated. This is a what if question. If you didn't
> have the local exchange, would you still haul highly elastic traffic
> like USENET across your long-haul links? Or is it highly elastic
> traffic like at-home students or employees who use a local ISP modem
> pool for access instead of dialing directly into the remote institution.
>
> And finally, usability. The I know it when I see it issue. The right
> combination of adequate speed, low latency, and little congestion that
> gives the end-user a 'good' connection. Since we still have a hard time
> defining what is 'good' this is the hardest one to measure. I can really
> only measure this indirectly, such as the number of customer compliants or
> through surveys of non-customers. In general, customers of ISPs connected
> to the local exchange point report better connections to resources on ISPs
> also attached to the local exchange point than to those same ISPs before
> the exchange point.
> --
> Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
> Affiliation given for identification not representation
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