Effects of de-peering... (was RE: ratios)

Fri May 10 17:29:23 UTC 2002

James Smith wrote (on May 10):
> Maybe it is possible he made a business decision based on the long term
> costs involved with multihoming/redundancy vs. the loss of near total
> reachability. He may have come to the conclusion that the probability of
> that scenario occuring was not sufficient reason to multihome. His call.

It's worth pointing out it's not always a technical decision. Partcularly
when things are tight, the bean-counters and other senior management tend
to shy away from "redunancy" and "resilience" often in favour of "insurance
policies" and "controlled risk".

Similar business-decisions are what cause those networks to not peer.
Whether fair or not doesn't matter. Big companies are big businesses. Big
businesses like to remain big. They all have debt and thus need revenue.
A common view is that a peer is the loss of a potential customer. Drop
all your peers, gain some potential customers. (Sprint said this to me in
those words once)

While nobody has tried to take a "Tier-1" to court for what could be taken
as anti-competitive actions said providers will carry on - it's win-win
for them. The marginal loss of connectivity to *your* network is so small
from their perspective, there's no issue. If mutual customers complain,
they blame you for not connecting to them (from experience, and having
seen this done in black and white). The words used are along the lines
of "that is what happens when you connect to a non-tier-1, like us".

Just for reference, the European Peering Policy for one of the previously
mentioned carriers in this thread requires the announcement of 900+ /19's
from seperate LIR assignments, as well as the usual N-points connected,
M-bps transfered etc requirements. I'm under NDA so can't say more.
needless to say, we don't peer with them, and I don't buy transit from 
them either, on principle.

We calculated that at the time only 5 IP providers in Europe (that were not
US owned networks) would meet that 900+ /19's requirement.

Chris.