Cable & Wireless "de-peering"?!?

Barrows, Jeff jsb at aleron.com
Mon May 7 21:06:42 UTC 2001



>>>> From: Peter van Dijk [mailto:peter at dataloss.nl]
>
> Unet is, for example, one of the few (if not the only) ISP in The
> Netherlands that charges for *peering* (no, not transit, just 
> peering).
>

  I suspect [but don't know, as I don't work for UUNET anymore] that
  you are confusing 'paid peering' with the transit product, when
  configured to exchange only a specific subset of the possible
  routes.

  The real difference is this:  Do you get a different price /PER MB/
  for getting only a subset of routes as opposed to getting full
  routes from them?

  If you are still unsure, just ask UUNET if they consider you a
  peer or a customer-- they'll tell you.  Hint: If you send them
  money, you are a customer.

  Many, many, many, [a whole bunch of] customers of major networks
  pay full transit prices from upstream transit providers, and only
  elect to receive [or use] that upstream providers' customer routes.
  The smallest networks out there can configure their boxes to do
  this, and it doesn't mean that they are a paid peer of any given
  network.  It just means that they are deciding where to send their
  traffic.

  I know some providers offer a lower-priced peering-routes-only
  product.  I don't think such a UUNET product exists.  Perhaps 
  the sales person led you to believe that it was paid peering, 
  or the person you heard this from didn't convey it to you
  correctly?  (I don't mean to imply that UUNET sales folks would
  do this, just that most large sales teams tend to get a few
  folks that cloud product definitions from time to time.)

  It is good to see that various larger providers (i.e., Genuity's
  AS1 Express [paid-peering] product) are offering this service.
  I am curious as to how they feel it is affecting their revenue,
  as it has the potential to get a lot of customers to convert from
  full-price transit to a cheaper price for a subset of routes, or
  lead to a cannibalization of some of their largest customers.
  Presumably, one could limit the set of customers that qualified 
  for such a product to some smaller subset that was of interest.

  It would seem more fitting for networks that are less-peered
  to offer such a product, as they can pass some savings on to
  customers that don't require them to pay for traffic to go 
  off-net via their costly upstream transit links.  For networks
  that are essentially fully peered, the economics of offering
  such a product aren't as clear to me.

  I am interested in hearing thoughts on this topic offline.

 - jsb

P.S. Again, I don't work for UUNET, and don't intend to speak
     for them or discuss anything proprietary to UUNET.




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