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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Provider credibility - does it matter? was Re:
> Its like two animals meeting in the jungle at night: > > If you are of equal "size" you'll quite happily sit about, exchange > pleasantries, and even peer IP packets with zero dollar settlement. > > But if either creature is bigger than the other then you can expect a > somewhat different outcome, normally involving a forced exchange of > protein. Oh, not always by any stretch of the imagination. Trying to eat someone in this fashion, in the wild, is traditionally risky. You can get poisoned, you can fail, and you can get tricked into doing something that causes you to become the food. Just for openers. > Zero dollar peering is not a panacea for Internet connectivity: If > party A invests a few squillion dollars in infrastructure it is > unlikely that they will peer with party B who has purchased a PC and a > couple of modems. Normally Party A would say to B - "tough luck sport, > it s a client relationship we are talking about here", simply as the > issue here is that if A offers 0 dollar peering to B, A writes off a > small part of their investment. This is not an economically stable > relationbship. Stability comes when A and B percieve that the > exchange of traffic is of equal benefit to both parties, and in > general this happens when A and B are of equal "size". > > Thanks, > > Geoff No. The exchange of traffic is *always* of equal benefit to both parties. Both parties have a customer who wants to get to the other (if this was not the case there would be no flow of traffic at all). Each party has been PAID to get that traffic to the other. An attempt to get paid TWICE is extortionate and the act of a firm which is trying to throw its weight around. It MAY even be actionable. It *certainly* is good marketing fodder for the smaller firm in every case, and I will say this -- we can, do, and WILL exploit these irregularities. We talk to smaller providers all the time. Part of the game is making sure customers are INFORMED. Part of informing them includes making sure they know what the real choices are, who has what USABLE bandwidth, where it goes, and what *policy* decisions each provider might be making that would affect connectivity and quality of service. Deliberate refusals to interconnect are just another part of this. An INFORMED consumer will insure that the market balances itself out. The only way the "big providers" can play this kind of game is if the consumer is NOT informed. Ignorance is, in our experience, very easy to fix. -- -- Karl Denninger ([email protected])| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity http://www.mcs.net/~karl | T1's from $600 monthly to FULL DS-3 Service | 23 Analog Prefixes, 13 ISDN, Web servers $75/mo Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| Email to "[email protected]" WWW: http://www.mcs.net/ Fax: [+1 312 248-9865] | 2 FULL DS-3 Internet links; 400Mbps B/W Internal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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