North American Network Operators Group
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RE: C&W Peering Problem?

  • From: Albert Meyer
  • Date: Sat Jun 02 18:21:59 2001 
At 12:19 AM 6/2/01 -0400, Vivien M. wrote:

I know this was beaten to death a few threads ago, but there are ISPs (eg:
one of ours) that bill 95th percentile on the TOTAL of inbound and outbound.
I almost got caught by this one a few months ago. I was fixing to sign a contract with Exodus for a 100bT circuit when I noticed some funny-looking language and asked some probing questions, and then realized that I had to double their quoted rates before comparing them to everyone else. This moved them from the front of the pack back to UU-land. UUNet is another story. They not only charge significantly more than everyone else, but they calculate 95th percentile on the higher of incoming and outgoing rather than the average. When I asked my salesperson why she couldn't give me a competitive rate, she said "Because we're UUNet." She seemed pretty taken aback when I explained to her that UUNet actually had a pretty bad reputation in NetAdmin circles and I wasn't interested in paying a premium for their name. She still declined to give me a competitive rate.

I hear that InFlow charges for average traffic rather than 95th percentile. They're not a backbone, but I wouldn't be surprised to see backbone networks start doing that before too long. It would require some excess capacity, but they would probably make more money in the long run.