CDNs should pay eyeball networks, too.

Tue May 1 16:39:34 UTC 2012

Yesterday I received the following mail, from a CDN:

---->8----
Greetings,

Limelight Networks periodically reviews its interconnection strategy to ensure the quality and integrity of its interconnection between all its partners. We have recently updated our requirements for settlement-free peering which are posted at http://www.as22822.net/

This letter is to notify you that yyy no longer meets our minimum requirements. If yyy would like to maintain our current interconnectivity, there will be settlement associated with doing so. If you are interested in pursuing this option, please reply back to this email indicating such.

Should your company decline this option, or if we do not have an agreement regarding the settlement in place prior to May 31st 2012, Limelight Networks will terminate the peering sessions on that day, with this letter serving as 30 day notice.

Sincerely,
----8<----

The same mail was sent out last year, about end of April 2011, to another ISP I'm working with.
They got depeered, but the ISP which received the mail above yesterday didn't meet the requirements last year either.
I totally understand that some companies might not be able to handle sub-5Mbps peering sessions, be it technical or organisational, but >=100Mbps should be worth any effort, as long as it improves the network.

In this particular case I'm talking about >=600Mbps of traffic send out by Limelight to "my" eyeballs, not mentioning their fairly small footprint in Germany in comparison to other CDNs.

These points aside, we are talking about a Content *Delivery* Network here. There are CDNs out there who burn to improve their customer experience (both the content creators and the content receiver) at high cost.
Having a Tier1 attitude and telling eyeball networks with <1Gbps of traffic exchanged to bugger off or pay is not one of the ways to improve this.

At the end of the day I'm going to charge CDNs who want to deliver their customers content to my eyeballs and make me pay (about 2USD per Mbps, with a minimum of 1Gbps).

-dominik