Cable & Wireless "de-peering"?!?

Sun May 6 05:08:12 UTC 2001

On Sat, May 05, 2001 at 08:21:03PM -0700, John Payne wrote:
>
> On Sat, May 05, 2001 at 07:31:25PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
> >
> >     Not so fast. While each of his customers is more inconvenienced
> > than each c&w customer, c&w has more customers. The net inconvenience
> > (total number of people inconvenienced multiplied by the average
> > inconvenience to each) might be nearly the same on both sides. As an
> > added bonus, he has someone else to blame.
>
> That depends.  Somebody that small (0.0001) is not going to be transit
> free... so there isn't really a hole created.  Sure, the smaller guy
> is going to be paying more on transit rather than peering, but C&W
> customers probably won't notice a thing, other than some relief on the
> congested pipes to the public peering points.

The number of customers affected is unimportant, what matters is the
amount of traffic affected. I don't know about anyone else, but I think if
I had just been "de-peered" the provider in question would be the LAST on
my list to purchase transit from. In all likelihood the traffic is just
going to go to another CW peer and to an FNSI transit. But to determine
the true loser, you must know if this peer served a useful technical
function. If this was a low-quality peer (congested, through a lossy atm
nap, etc) or relieved no congestion elsewhere, the loser is FNSI. If on
the other hand this peer was providing a better path, the traffic will be
affected. Since billing is based on traffic, the loser is whoever can no
longer bill their customers for something they got for free.

Also, not that I care much about either FNSI or Clueless & Witless
peering, but the argument that noone would be affected AND traffic would
be reduced makes no sense. If there is a significant reduction in
congestion then there must have been a significant amount of traffic
flowing through the peer. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest argument
for peering with FNSI is Pimp War (http://www.pimpwar.com). :P

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)