C&W peering

Wed Jun 6 12:17:22 UTC 2001

What I find most interesting about all these disputes is that none of the major
players appear to be even slightly interested in settled interconnection - like
they have in the telephony world.

Before you all flame me for mindless idealism :-)  YES I know the gore is in the
detail. YES it's a million miles from simple.

The way I see it though, is that if there's a will there must be a way and there
is clearly a will to change today's status quo. These top tier networks are
relatively stable, they are large enough for deliberate manipulation of metrics
to be operationally very sensitive/ cumbersome.

There was a paper I saw ages ago:

http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/iip/cai/farnon.html

that discussed some of the economics behind peering. Though it's a bit old now,
many of it's arguments hold true (hence todays CW/PSI/MFN/UUNet conundrums). It
also just begins to explore the possiblities (and difficulties) of billaterally
settled peering.

Though any system for performing this would need to be far more fair and robust
than anything proposed in the paper, I perceive there to be a vast opportunity
for this model of Interconnection - the gap between free peering and transit is
too great to fit all relationships and the higher the financial stakes get, the
more free interconnect relationships will be stressed.

As a plus point there would be more cash flow (even without any net gain/loss),
which seems to be flavour of the month with telco's at the moment.

Maybe an independent third party would help here - like the clearinghouses/S&Ps
of this world. Anyone got any cash they want to invest? (only kidding). The idea
being that we get our own commercial regulator, rather than some .gov one.

cheers
Toby
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