On a future of open settlement free peering

William Herrin bill at herrin.us
Tue Jul 29 17:30:20 UTC 2014


Howdy folks,

It seems to me that we're moving in a direction where either
ratioless, high-capacity settlement-free peering will be a industry
requirement exercised voluntarily, or where some heavy-handed
government regulation will compel some kind of interconnection that
the holdouts find even less desirable. I can only hope the holdouts
will "see the light" before the weight of government crashes down on
them -- regulation has no winners, only losers and bigger losers. And
sometimes the worst thing that can happen is you get what you ask for
with no opportunity to later change your mind.

I'm curious what lies beyond that horizon. If we stipulate for the
sake of the discussion that open peering is the way it going to be, a
critical part of network neutrality, what exactly will that mean?


Will it be permissible for one network to ask the other to pay a
one-time port cost for the initial interconnect, assuming its
representative of the actual cost of a one-time equipment addition?

To what degree is redundancy a requirement? If a network refuses to
peer in more than one chancy location, does that mean their peering
policy isn't really open?

Will a network be compliant if the open peering connections are only
available in its own data center? Or will they need to be available in
neutral data centers?

Would a refusal to connect to neutral peering fabrics constitute a
refusal to connect to smaller networks? Or is it reasonable to state
that anybody who can't come up with 10 gig ports and cross-connects
isn't of threshold size?

Can a peering policy be open if it's regionally restricted? If my
peering points for the mid-Atlantic states only announce routes tied
to my mid-Atlantic customers and only propagate your routes to those
mid-Atlantic customers, is that acceptable behavior? Or have I
mis-served my customers if I don't pull all of them to the location
you find it convenient to peer?


Food for thought,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
Can I solve your unusual networking challenges?



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