COVID-19 vs. peering wars

Fri Mar 20 19:40:24 UTC 2020

Worldwide, I don’t know.

In Canada, peering is pretty messed up, i.e. it simply doesn’t happen at scale.  At all.  Even where it should.  The overwhelmingly vast majority of Canadian traffic, even when nominally in-country, still transits the USA somewhere.

If we had “ideal” full-mesh peering (i.e. setting aside all commercial considerations) at, say, regional IXes, including various popular CDNs, then service would take a giant step for the better for everyone who isn’t a big-4 (Bell, Telus, Shaw or Rogers) customer.  Which admittedly would be an improvement for “only” about 30%-40% of the population… negligible, really, we’re only a country of 10M after all :-/.

FYI, we have 4 big ISPs because none of them cover the entire country: they all* descend from local/regional monopolies or duopolies.   *Mostly, that’s an approximation.
-Adam

Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
[[MERLIN LOGO]]<https://www.merlin.mb.ca/>
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athompson at merlin.mb.ca<mailto:athompson at merlin.mb.ca>
www.merlin.mb.ca<http://www.merlin.mb.ca/>

From: Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com>
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2020 2:31 PM
To: Adam Thompson <athompson at merlin.mb.ca>
Cc: Sadiq Saif <lists at sadiqsaif.com>; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: COVID-19 vs. peering wars

I'm curious;
would people say that fixing peering inefficiencies could have
a bigger impact on service performance than asking that
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, Hulu, and other video
streaming services cut their bit rates down?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51968302
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/netflix-and-youtube-cut-streaming-quality-in-europe-to-handle-pandemic/

It seems that perhaps the fingers, and the regulatory
hammer, are being pointed in the wrong direction at
the moment.  ^_^;

Matt
staying safely under the saran-wrap blanket for the next few weeks

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 9:31 AM Adam Thompson <athompson at merlin.mb.ca<mailto:athompson at merlin.mb.ca>> wrote:
Every large ISP does this (or rather, doesn't) at every IX in Canada.  Bell isn't unique by any stretch.

It's not in their economic interest to peer at a local IX, because from their perspective, the IX takes away business (Managed L2 point-to-point circuits, at the very least) from them.

Don't expect the dominant wireline ISP(s) in any region to join local IXes anytime soon, sadly, no matter how much it would benefit their customers.  After all, the customer is always free to purchase service to the IX and join the IX, right???  *grumble*

In my local case, if BellMTS joined MBIX, un-cached DNS resolution times could potentially drop by 15msec.  That's HUGE.  But the end-user experience is not their primary goal.  Their primary goal is profit, as always.

-Adam Thompson
 Founding member, MBIX (once upon a time)

Adam Thompson
Consultant, Infrastructure Services
MERLIN
100 - 135 Innovation Drive
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 6A8
(204) 977-6824 or 1-800-430-6404 (MB only)
athompson at merlin.mb.ca<mailto:athompson at merlin.mb.ca>
www.merlin.mb.ca<http://www.merlin.mb.ca>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: NANOG <nanog-bounces at nanog.org<mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org>> On Behalf Of Sadiq Saif
> Sent: Friday, March 20, 2020 9:38 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>
> Subject: Re: COVID-19 vs. peering wars
>
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2020, at 10:31, Steve Mikulasik via NANOG wrote:
> >
> > In Canada the CRTC really needs to get on Canadian ISPs about peering
> > very liberally at IXs in each province. I know of one major
> > institution right now that would have a major work from home issue
> > resolved if one big ISP would peer with one big tier 1 in the IX they
> > are both located at in the same province. Instead traffic needs to
> > flow across the country or to the USA to get back to the same city.
>
> **cough** Bell Canada **cough**.
>
> --
>   Sadiq Saif
>   https://sadiqsaif.com/
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