net neutrality and peering wars continue

Thu Jun 20 21:32:55 UTC 2013

On Jun 20, 2013, at 10:39 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net> wrote:

> * woody at pch.net (Bill Woodcock) [Thu 20 Jun 2013, 16:59 CEST]:
>> On Jun 20, 2013, at 5:37 AM, Benson Schliesser <bensons at queuefull.net> wrote:
> 
>>> Right. By "sending peer" I meant the network transmitting a packet, unidirectional flow, or other aggregate of traffic into another network. I'm not assuming anything about whether they are offering "content" or something else - I think it would be better to talk about peering fairness at the network layer, rather than the business / service layer.
>> In that case, it's essentially never an issue, since essentially every packet in one direction is balanced by a packet in the other direction, so rotational symmetry takes care of the "fairness."
> 
> You're mistaken if you think that CDNs have equal number of packets going in and out.

They are roughly equal (modulo delayed acks, etc.). However, the number of octets is very different from the number of packets. There is much greater asymmetry in number of octets than in number of packets.

To the best of my knowledge, most (if not all) of the peering agreements that discuss traffic ratios do so in terms of data transferred, not number of datagrams.

Owen