Level 3 Peering Guidelines

Fri Aug 19 20:51:21 UTC 2011

In a message written on Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 04:29:05PM -0400, Adam Rothschild wrote:
>   http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7021703819

I like to see Level 3 arguing this with the regulators.  AboveNet
persued this line of thinking with a number of ISP's in the late
1990's with some success, and I believe others did as well.  AboveNet
implmented it by honoring MEDs from peers, and thus doing a cold
potato routing and carrying a higher bit-mile cost.

Ratio is the most broken part about modern peering agreements.
Ratio really has no bearing on the costs to either ISP, it is an
artifact of their position in the world.  That is to say the type
of ISP (end user, content) location (urban, rural) or technologies
(dsl, cable, leased line) along with user behavior determine the
ratio.  Early ISP's that had similar customer mixes, locations, and
technologies could use ratio as an easy proxy, but those days are
long gone.

The primary challenge to change is the technical community coming
up with some metric that is easy to measure and senior management
can understand.  You can go to a VP and say "the ratio to them is
1.5:1" and they get it (or so they think).  Trying to make the same
argument that on some vague level you are deriving "equal benefit"
is much larger.  I like Level 3's effort in using the bit-mile cost
but I don't know any way to measure that metric easily on a large
network.

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