Favorites (Re: UUNET peering policy)

Mon Jan 15 18:50:35 UTC 2001

The argument that "outbound is bad" was particularly sound when most
national backbones were 1) leased and 2) small. That's not really the case
anymore. With lots of bandwidth, this paradigm should really start to
shift - who cares if someone if dumping outbound on you, and you have to
backhaul it across the country? There would seem to be no actual economic
reason to justify traffic ratios - except, of course the desire to
discourage peering and encourage transit, but not removing a barrier that
once was meaningful, and now is deprecated. 

I don't feel sympathy for the example of many dialup POPs and a few large
data centers. There is a value for both parties in the exchange - content
is delivered to customers faster. With the cost of long-haul taking a
dive, one might think this would have more impact than a traffic ratio.

- Daniel Golding

On 15 Jan 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 14 January 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:
> > sean at donelan.com (Sean Donelan) writes:
> > > If you look at Abovenet's traffic graphs, you'll notice Abovenet has a wide
> > > variety of traffic balances with different providers.  Some in Abovenet's
> > > favor (such as 3:1 with Sprint, 5:1 with Teleglobe) and some in the other
> > > provider's favor (such as 1:3 with Exodus).  ...
> > 
> > "Favor"?  What, precisely, connotes "favor" in this regard?  Sending more, or
> > receiving more?  And: why?
> 
> Which side of the debate do you want to take?
> 
> 
> The traditional arguement is a network composed mostly of a few large data
> centers, with lots of servers sending traffic is getting a "free ride" on
> the network which built out nationwide and has POPs in every LATA.
> 
> UUNET deserves a return on its investment on all those wholesale dialup
> POPs and circuits to underserved rural areas.  Abovenet is just cream
> skimming in a few large metro areas, while UUNET does the hard work of
> carrying that extra traffic imbalance.  Abovenet selling "cheap" bandwidth
> because it doesn't have the cost of delievering the traffic that UUNET
> has to pay.
> 
> The opposite side is Abovenet has invested a lot into its sites and MFN
> into its networks.  It just choose to do it in a different way than UUNET.
> Its more expensive to lay fiber in metro areas than rural areas.  It costs
> a lot of money to operate the centers.  Whether the traffic is being paid
> by the millions of $19.95 dialup users on UUNET's wholesale ports or
> by the hundreds of hosters in Abovenet's sites, the traffic is paid.
> 
> 
> 