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Re: Provider credibility - does it matter? was Re: Inter-provider relations

  • From: Vadim Antonov
  • Date: Fri Oct 25 17:24:27 1996 
Roger Bohn <[email protected]> wrote:

At 8:36 PM -0700 10/24/96, Vadim Antonov wrote:
>Note that i didn't even talk about less measurabe, but way too
>more important things like hosting of information suppliers.
>Say, Big Provider connects 1000 web sites; Small Provider hosts
>1 site -- benefit from peering in terms of Web site diversity to
>the Big Provider's customers is 0.1%.  To Small Provider's
>customers the benefit of peering is 99.9%.

>Oops, this has an arithmetic fallacy.  Assuming that Big Provider also has
>1000x more customers than Small Provider, and that all 1001 web sites are
>equally attractive, then there are 1000 BP  customers each with a .001
>chance of wanting to surf the SP web site.  Compare this with 1 SP customer
>with a .999 chance of wanting to surf a BP web site, and a .001 chance of
>surfing the SP web site.

No, this is not about mutual traffic -- this is about benefit to
_a_ customer.

Your computation is correct but is completely irrelevant from the
point of view of a customer.  They're interested in reacheability, not
traffic at some exchange point.

I.e. each small ISP's customer derives 99.9% of benefit from the peering,
while large ISP's customer derives only 0.01%.  Hence, the large ISP
can force small ISP to pay up -- without connectivity to a large ISP the
small ISP will be dead pretty soon.  This is exactly like grocery chains
which can (and do) force consumers to pay up for food -- although you
can grow your own tomatoes in your backyard and probably sell them to
those grocery chains.  Good chances are, they're not interested.

--vadim
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