OT - Importance of Content

Thu Jul 11 14:55:11 UTC 2002

Chicken and the egg.

About 1997 - early 1998 time frame, there was talk of some big 
content players getting together to do something similar.  I remember 
it was some large financial institutes, Disney, etc.  There were 5 
serious content players that could not get peering and were being 
forced into a corner to pay what they considered extreme pricing for 
transit.  They were all in Pacbell territory and the talk was coming 
together to force peering with some of the larger backbones or having 
them lose access to the content.

It was a good plan except you have to be willing to following through 
with the painful poker game.  There could be an outage of about a 
week before a certain backbone might cave in.  Still the plan would 
see to have a good chance of succeeding as long as you went 1 
backbone at a time.  That way you do not create an organized 
opposition.  Most downstream users would complain loudly if they 
could not reach their brokerage accounts, or yahoo, or perhaps MSN 
etc etc.

With many very large content players building out new backbones now, 
we may see some of that.  More likely it will be pricing pressure on 
transit, not transit-free peering.

Scott makes some good points.  (How is that shinny corvette?)

Shane as far as the "thought" that backbones will "pay" to get to 
your content.  It's just not going to happen.  If the content were 
that important they might go directly to your customers and offer 
them a wonderful deal to buy a link from them.  Or they might "give" 
them peering.  Or with much of the key content now residing of 
servers like akamai, how much could u really make per meg since 
akamai resides servers across different backbones.  It's an 
interesting poker play, a long shot.  Still if you got yahoo and MSN 
to go along with it.... then again you still have to argue the upside 
to working through a 3rd party.

David

At 22:02 -0400 7/10/02, Scott Patterson wrote:
>Be careful with this approach to gaining peering.......While you may gain
>some, you will probably end up paying more in monthly transit fees than its
>worth.  Speaking from experience here.......Having worked for a national
>player that took this approach (prior to my involvement with the company, so
>I did what I could with what I was given, thanks to an acquisition), I don't
>care how much content you have, if you can't prove that you can meet the
>remaining requirements that peers set forth (ratios, network size, # of
>pinball machines per node), you aren't getting the peering.  Most of the
>"large" networks don't care about your content.  They know if you fail to
>provide quality routes to your customers, your customers will eventually
>give up (I don't care if you only charge them $10/mb) and become their
>customers (or customers of someone whom they already have a significant
>peering relationship with). Ideally, if you wanted to obtain quality
>peering, you would focus on gaining both types of traffic and sustaining a
>"reasonable balance" of push:pull.  If not........I hope you have a lot of
>cash in the bank to continue paying VERY high transit fees to accommodate
>the volume of content that you bring on (Hopefully you charge your customers
>more for transit than the rate you pay your upstream and you'll be OK ;).
>If you fail to do so, you should see the implosion coming a mile away.  All
>of this being said, don't build your business model around gaining content
>to gain peering, b/c these days, there is no such thing as critical mass.
>
>
>Just my $0.02
>
>
>
>Scott
>
>
>>  -----Original Message-----
>>  From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
>>  Owens, Shane (EPIK.ORL)
>>  Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 1:50 PM
>>  To: nanog at nanog.org
>>  Subject: OT - Importance of Content
>>
>>
>>
>>  I was wondering the importance of content to IP providers. Is it
>>  feasible to
>>  go after a lot of hosting companies and such as a business model
>>  and greatly
>>  skew your traffic ratios to hopefully reach a critical mass.  I
>>  would think
>>  at some point you would have so much content that people would
>>  start to come
>>  to you for peering or to purchase access to get to that content
>>  which would
>>  cause a reduction in overall transit costs, but what would that critical
>>  mass be and how valid is that thought?
>>
>>  Opinions?
>>
>>  Shane Owens
>>
>>

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