Sprint peering policy

Sat Jun 29 14:19:07 UTC 2002

Let me play devils advocate for a moment:

On Sat, Jun 29, 2002 at 12:04:23AM -0700, william at elan.net wrote:
> 
> Give example of other industry where such goverment intervention happened 
> and has helped that industry? And what goverment exactly are we talking 
> about - US Goverment? France Goverment? China Goverment? This is internet 
> - its rules should not be based purely on decision of one single goverment. 

How is the US government regulating the interconnections of major US
carriers terribly different from the current anti-trust regulating they
do?

On Sat, Jun 29, 2002 at 10:28:17AM +0100, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
>
> I think this is the key point. Its common sense that peering with the
> downstreams will improve user quality of service by both reducing
> latency and taking unnecessary points of failure out of the network.

Not necessarily.

Think about it from the large tier 1's perspective. Lets say you are Joe
Sixpack ISP, and they peer with you in one location. They now have to haul
your traffic to and from this one location, wasting expensive bandwidth on
their backbone. They also now have only one point where they send your
traffic, a single point of failure which can easily become congested. 
Making sure that it doesn't requires capacity planning, which again costs 
time and money. Heck even the router port and the cost of writing down 
your ASN in a central database probably costs them more than you are worth 
as a peer, even assuming that you pay the way to their doorstep.

On the other hand, if they peer with your tier 1 transit provider, they 
probably have 6+ key locations on their network where they can send 
traffic, and plenty of capacity to support it.

Why should they bother with you, what value do you add to them? Oh thats 
right, you think you should get access to their network for free. Not a 
convincing argument for them. :)

The point where I start to disagree with tough peering policies is the 
point where they turn exclusionary for no technical reason, for example an
OC48 backbone or selling in 15 major markets. Why do you need an OC48 
backbone? Maybe you engineered your network intelligently so you don't
have to haul an OC48's worth of traffic around. All you NEED is the 
capacity to support the traffic being exchanged. And what does how many 
cities you sell in have to do with the exchange of traffic?

These policies exist for the sole purpose of excluding people who are not
"one of them", even if they are otherwise technically capable of making a
good peering partner. When all (or most) of the tier 1's get together like 
this to exclude potential new competition from having access to vital 
peering partners necessary to succeed, only bad government mojo can 
result.

Also don't forget that one of the quickest tests of tier 1 status is how
much money you are blowing for no reason. After all, if you were REALLY
one of them, you'd have purchased a billion dollar OC48 network "just
because", and you would be doing your datacenter peering with SONET oc3's
instead of ethernet "just because". If you're doing things cheaper, 
better, or faster, you're not really a "peer" of theirs are you. :)

-- 
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)