from Dave Farber's list: Ireland to regulate peering

Sun Jun 15 22:21:30 UTC 2003

Roland Perry wrote:
> In practice, regulators will only intervene at all, if one of the ISPs 
> has SMP. This is now almost impossible to achieve (tests of "dominance" 
> apply) especially with the diversity of transit providers. An SMP ISP 
> would have to dominate the *entire* market for wholesale transit in a 
> country.

Ireland differs significantly from the UK and many other european 
countries in that the number of ISPs and wholesale transit providers 
operating on the island is much smaller.  While none of the ISPs has SMP 
designation, it is conceivable that it could happen, given the relative 
sizes of some of them.

That said, though, it is extremely unlikely that the regulation engine 
is going to jump in and start dictating to the ISP's what they should or 
shouldn't do wrt IP peering.  There has been an industry-run IX (INEX - 
http://www.inex.ie/) running for several years, and there have been 
remarkably few squabbles about peering during its lifetime.  For this 
reason, if for no other, it is unlikely that SMP designation would serve 
any useful purpose in this instance.

The ComReg directive is simply an implementation of directive 
2002/19/EC, which will be applied in one form or another across all EU 
member states.

These are personal opinions only.  I do various work for the INEX, but 
do not speak for them.

Nick