ratios

Thu May 9 18:45:07 UTC 2002

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 10:17:38AM -0700, Scott Granados wrote:
> 
> I actually think this is put very well.  I know that in my case I'd 
> prefer to buy transit from a company who has an open peering policy.  
> For example, I'd certainly consider buying transit from mfn before uunet 
> for example.  I realize there are many other factors including 
> relyability, cost, company stability etc. but one consideration ior me 
> is their willingness to peer and grow their networks.

The status of those peering links is most important than if they exist or
not. I'm not aware of any major UUNet peers being congested, as compared
to say a company in an extremely difficult financial situation who just
laid off almost all of their engineers and doesn't have any time or
resources for upgrading congested peers.

Yes UU only privately peers with like 20 people and it's quite possible
that your traffic will just go to another large backbone and be congested
there, but thats the chance you take in this world which believes in
claiming "99.999% uptime with self healing sonet rings!" instead of
showing you their actual capacity and utilization.

If you choose to peer with only 20 people, but do it with massive amounts
of capacity, that is one thing. If you keep old congested peers around,
and you refuse to upgrade them or stonewall for years promising upgrades
but never follow through because you don't like someones ratio, that is
another. At the end of the day I can still have respect for UU because
they get the packets through, even if I don't necessarily agree with where
they send them to do it.

> The only thing I can say is I wish they would just publically
> acknowledge that fact.  If uunet and cw don't wish to peer they should
> just not have a peering policy.

I think Level 3's is still the most difficult on paper, despite the fact 
that most of their peers will never meet these requirements
(http://www.level3.com/1511.html):

Dual OC48 into every city
Presence in 15 major cities
1000Mb/s minimum traffic exchanged
Must peer at OC12 or higher
Must peer in 8 locations

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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