Survey: Peering Staffing Levels

Wed Jun 12 22:38:14 UTC 2002

Andy,

What I have seen (and what I have in fact done) was handle the 
peering negotiations, usually this needs to be an executive level 
person.  In fact Dwight is right, it's usually someone that 
understands the vision of the network, and the company moving 
forward, with some skill to help translate this into a business case 
for the CFO types.

You then have a peering implementation engineer that will coordinate 
the config of the routers and provisioning of the circuits, or VPI 
VCIs etc etc.

The implementation person may actually have an assistant.  The 
training is considered valuable and it provides a measure of backup. 
Nowadays you almost need a regulatory person also.

If I were prone to humor I might say some ISPs lately have DE-peering 
engineer....

David

>On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Dwight Ernest wrote:
>
>>  I'm interested in getting some idea of the level of staffing provided by
>>  NSPs and ISPs in their peering departments. In fact, I've been asked by
>>  my management to provide as much info about such levels as possible,
>>  without a need to disclose the identity of any responding company.
>
>Forgive me if I'm just used to small companies, but why would you really
>need more than one full time person (with an assistant possibly) in your
>peering department?
>
>Sure, the job requires a very specific skill set (something along the
>lines of an engineer with an MBA), but the day-to-day interactions and
>changes regarding peering would seem to be minimal. In fact, my impression
>seems to be that you don't really need anybody on staff to not return
>emails to peering@, which is seemingly how most providers deal with it. :)
>
>Note: I have absolutely no experience or data to base my assumptions on,
>so don't slap me too hard.
>
>Andy
>
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