|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: concern over public peering points [WAS: Peering point speedpublicly available?]
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> SIX's costs would be completely covered by charging each
> member with a GigE port $1k/mo.
Yes, but the SIX's costs are also completely covered _without_ charging
anybody $1K/month.
Go back and think about the purpose of an exchange: it's an economic
optimization over transit. It's the value-add that lets someone who buys
transit sell a service that's of greater value yet lesser cost than what
they buy. Now, what's an exchange that costs more money? Less effective.
So charging more money is just a way to make an exchange less effective,
not more effective.
Some people who don't bother to run the numbers think that reliability is
a justification for charging money at an exchange. I'd encourage them to
run the numbers. An exchange which costs twice as much money needs to be
twice as reliable to be equally effective. Ask yourself how many
exchanges there are that drop more than half the bits on the floor,
before you think of charging twice as much money.
In other words, if it's not broke, don't fix it.
> I would bet that there is more than enough business available to
> cover the costs of intelligent spending.
While I won't categorically dub that an oxymoron, I'd say that the
possibility of their being "intelligent spending" at an exchange is, um,
extremely rare. Military intelligence. Jumbo shrimp. Microsoft Works.
> You could probably still give away FastE ports for free
Any economist, and most practical thinkers generally, will tell you that
creating artificial inequities isn't terribly wise. Likewise, incenting
bad behaviors like using too-small ports isn't terribly wise. In an
exchange, if you want to avoid congestion, and have to charge money for
some reason, you probably want to charge the same amount per port,
regardless of port speed. But you're a lot better off just solving
whatever problem is costing money in the first place.
-Bill
|