North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: C&W Peering Problem?
so, if it is primarily the content providers that these "de-peer" rampage folks have their middle finger directed toward; if hosting provider brand X does content caching close to peering locations (thus the return path very likely being symetrical and neither party is hauling the traffic farther than "necessary"), will the "de-peer" folks consider different ratios or no ratios at all? ignoring the how/what part of doing the caching. Sat, Jun 02, 2001 at 02:24:41PM -0400, Leo Bicknell: > > On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 07:28:03PM -0700, Sean Donelan wrote: > > So, can anyone explain why C&W, UUNET or Genuity care about traffic > > balance, other than to limit competition by providers who are better > > at attracting particular types of customers than them? If you are good > > at being a webhoster, your traffic will have one profile. If you are > > good at being an access provider, your traffic will have another profile. > > There are several reasons to care about traffic ratio. Where I > think the mistake is made is that providers are looking at ratio, > but that the ratios they use are fixed regardless of the type of > network they are evaluating. That said, it's hard to get more > flexable guidelines past the lawyers and bean counters, particularly > in a large orginization. > > Here's a few interesting cases, first, the ratio problem. > > A1--------------B1---User > | | > | | > | | > server---A2--------------B2 > > Consider "A" is west coast, "B" is east coast. User requests flow > B1, B2, A2, while reponses flow A2, A1, B1. Provider 1 ends up > carrying more bits a longer distance, and thus incurs a higher > cost. > > There are several responses to this argument, each with their own > problems: > > * That's what you get for building and end user network. If you > don't like it, build a data center network. Most people don't > like suggesting their business model is broken. > > * Use BGP MEDs to make the return route A2, B2, B1. This moves > the cost to network 2, which may or may not be fair. Many times > provider 1 does not trust provider 2 to do this properly. Even > when they do, sometimes it is impossible. BBN and ATT are good > examples. If someone sends you a single /8, you have no choice > but to hot potato it out, as meds make no sense. The only solution > is deaggregation, which has a large number of other problems. > > * A settlement should be paid from network 2 to network 1. This > is possibly acceptable, if it comes in the form of a settlement. > Often the pricing resembles transit, below. > > * Network 2 should buy transit from network 1. Most of the medium > to large networks are trying to be transit free, and reject this > outright. Also, it's quite likely they would by transit from, > well, anyone else just so network 1 doesn't get the money from it. > > There is an important factor here many of the depeering crowd are > missing. The overall traffic ratio of your network is more or less > fixed, and is determined by your customer base. Unless you can > convert peers to customers (which I have never seen someone be > successful in doing on any scale), you will simply move the problem > around. That is, if you're 2:1 with Sprint, and depeer 5 10:1 > guys, they may well buy transit from Sprint, moving them to 3:1 > (due to traffic volume). Now what, depeer Sprint? > > Most people from their billing software can add up all customer in > and all customer out. If your ratio is under that number, you will > _NEVER_ reach it, no matter what you do. Since individual peers > will be different, you probably want your limit to be about twice > your customer ratio, at a minimum. > > This is why I believe you have to evaulate people based on value. > Consider someone like @home peering with someone like Globix. One > is a pure end user provider, that in fact prevents most of it's > users from running servers and the like. The other is a pure web > hosting company, with lots of content and almost no users. > > These two networks _cannot exist without each other_. If they > refused to peer with each other based on ratio, it would be utter > folly. Clearly there is great value to both of them in peering, > even though the ratio may well be 10:1 or higher. > > One of the funniest results of the ratio dance is that it may well > create more competitiors for a large network. A tight ratio (eg, > 1.5:1) is really a requirement that you have a similar customer > mix, so you have a similar amount of in+out traffic. How many web > hosting networks, who didn't want to compete for end users have > been forced to go after end users big time? How many access only > networks have done things to attract server users? Companies that > could have enjoyed much less competition have forced people to > compete with them by ratio. > > Equally interesting to me is the "minimum traffic" numbers that > many large networks want to put forth. Some of them are quite > high, with major networks requiring well over a gig of actual > traffic to qualify for peering. This has the effect of pushing > the restrictive peering policies down to smaller providers. If a > smaller provider has a lot of peers, they send less traffic to any > individual peer. One of the easiest ways to get that traffic level > is to pull peering with a bunch of transit customers of the network > you need to increase traffic with, which of course increases your > reliance on that paritcular peer. > > One could wonder if some large providers pushed C&W due to the > lack of traffic between their networks (since we know C&W had some > issues where they couldn't grow their network last year, and had > trouble turning up new customers) and that wasn't one of the > catalysts for this most recent action. > > -- > Leo Bicknell - [email protected] > Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 > Read TMBG List - [email protected], www.tmbg.org
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