Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity

Mon Jul 28 16:28:17 UTC 2014

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 12:33 AM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
> However, I can say what global prevailing business practice
> is, since I’ve actually surveyed and quantified it:
>
> Each network [..] pays their own way to the IXP of their
> choice that the other party is present at, each network
> receiving a packet pays their own way from the IXP of
> their counterpart’s choice that they’re present at,
> independently in each direction.

Hi Bill,

I take issue with this claim because:

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 12:56 AM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
> The survey was of interconnection norms, not of hugeness.

And, "Of the total analyzed agreements, [...] 141,512 (99.51%) were
“handshake” agreements in which the parties agreed to informal or
commonly understood terms without creating a written document."

As a result, the data set suffers three flaws:

1. It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the Internet.

2. The overwhelming majority of the agreements analyzed were handshake
agreements but no picture is available of the handshake agreements
those same parties rejected outright or, expecting rejection elected
not to pursue. That creates a data bias which could mask any number of
factors, leaving you no way to determine that the claimed norm bears
any resemblance to the results one might expect when proposing peering
with a neighbor.

3. The data supports no affirmative statement about the the peering
case most relevant to network neutrality: that of a small network
seeking to peer with a large one. More to the point, what agreements
occur or fail to occur when one network is in a position to strong-arm
the other and does this diverge from the general case?

That having been said, kudos for the excellent research. As far as
objective numbers go, yours are more thorough than any others I've
seen.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
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