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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