C&W Peering Problem?

Sat Jun 2 22:19:16 UTC 2001

At 12:19 AM 6/2/01 -0400, Vivien M. wrote:
>I know this was beaten to death a few threads ago, but there are ISPs (eg:
>one of ours) that bill 95th percentile on the TOTAL of inbound and outbound.

I almost got caught by this one a few months ago. I was fixing to sign a 
contract with Exodus for a 100bT circuit when I noticed some funny-looking 
language and asked some probing questions, and then realized that I had to 
double their quoted rates before comparing them to everyone else. This 
moved them from the front of the pack back to UU-land. UUNet is another 
story. They not only charge significantly more than everyone else, but they 
calculate 95th percentile on the higher of incoming and outgoing rather 
than the average. When I asked my salesperson why she couldn't give me a 
competitive rate, she said "Because we're UUNet." She seemed pretty taken 
aback when I explained to her that UUNet actually had a pretty bad 
reputation in NetAdmin circles and I wasn't interested in paying a premium 
for their name. She still declined to give me a competitive rate.

I hear that InFlow charges for average traffic rather than 95th percentile. 
They're not a backbone, but I wouldn't be surprised to see backbone 
networks start doing that before too long. It would require some excess 
capacity, but they would probably make more money in the long run.