ratios

Wed May 8 00:12:55 UTC 2002

In a message written on Tue, May 07, 2002 at 05:50:00PM -0400, PETER JANSEN wrote:
> the eyball or the content provider??? But keep in mind traffic
> ratios are only one parameter to establish a mutially equal beneit.

What I find unfortunate about most of the published peering policies
is that they don't seem to take the spirit of your statement to
heart.  Most of the published peering requirements are absolute.
These are the N areas we find important, and our definition of all
of them, please meet them all or you get nothing.  What these
requirements are doing are forcing a /business model/, in effect
increasing your own competition.

Imagine two providers.  One is a 100% content hosting play, the
other is a 100% end user access play.  In terms of ratio it will
be high (10:1?), as all the content flows to the users.  Neither
network would be of any value without the other, and I would argue
them peering is a perfect symbiotic relationship.

What a peering ratio like 1.5:1 does is require them to compete.
The hoster must go out and find end users, and the access provider
must find some content to host.  They start going after each others
customers, and a price war ensues hurting both companies.  The way
providers insure common ratios is to insure they have similar,
often overlapping customer bases.

Note, none of this has anything to do with geography or cost.  In
my two provider network you could give either one the nationwide
network, and make the other the small regional guy.  The "larger
cost" could fall on either network.

My point is not that ratio shouldn't be used, but that it shouldn't
be used in all cases.  Perhaps if you have 10 criteria to evaluate
a peer, it would be more reasonable to require them to meet 9 of
the 10, or 8 of the 10.  Allow for the fact that networks are
different.  Don't try to make every network look like your own,
you create more competition for yourself in the end.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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