North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: different thinking on exchanging traffic
thanks for thinking and writing it down. > I think there are actually a couple of different traffic measurements > of interest. traffic volume, traffic elasticity, and traffic usability. > > Traffic volume is fairly simple, but also mostly useless. Measure the > total traffic exchange through the local exchange point (e.g. peak 2Mbps > in St. Louis) and that is a definition of traffic exchanged by the local > ISPs that isn't going across transit lines to upstream providers. Harder > to measure is how 'local' any of the ISPs actually are. In the st. louis > case, all of the ISPs operate in at least two states, and two of them operate > in more than two states. None of them, as far as I know, have tried > to break up their routing into geographic regions. > > Traffic elasticity is an interesting issue. How much traffic is > being exchanged, which wouldn't otherwise be exchanged? In other words > is the existance of the local exchange point actually causing more > traffic to be generated. This is a what if question. If you didn't > have the local exchange, would you still haul highly elastic traffic > like USENET across your long-haul links? Or is it highly elastic > traffic like at-home students or employees who use a local ISP modem > pool for access instead of dialing directly into the remote institution. > > And finally, usability. The I know it when I see it issue. The right > combination of adequate speed, low latency, and little congestion that > gives the end-user a 'good' connection. Since we still have a hard time > defining what is 'good' this is the hardest one to measure. I can really > only measure this indirectly, such as the number of customer compliants or > through surveys of non-customers. In general, customers of ISPs connected > to the local exchange point report better connections to resources on ISPs > also attached to the local exchange point than to those same ISPs before > the exchange point. > -- > Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO > Affiliation given for identification not representation
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