North American Network Operators Group
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Re: cogent+ Level(3) are ok now

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Tue Nov 01 09:41:33 2005 
On Nov 1, 2005, at 7:53 AM, John Curran wrote:


At 12:27 PM +0000 11/1/05, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

Hi John,
Even with cold-potato routing, there is an expense in handling increased
levels of traffic that is destined for your network. This increase in traffic
often has no new revenue associated with it, because it is fanning out to
thousands of flat-rate consumer/small-business connections (e.g. DSL)
where billing is generally by peak capacity not usage.
not true for cogent tho, we know that virtually all their traffic is usage based
transit customers
The traffic from Cogent creates additional infrastructure requirements on L3.
L3 may (or may not) be able to recover these costs as incremental revenue
from the recipients, depending on the particulars of their agreements. One
way of mitigating their exposure is to set an upper bound on uncompensated
inbound traffic.

Mind you, this is entirely hypothetical, as specifics of the Cogent/ L3 agreement
are not available. However, it is one way to let everyone "bill and keep" for
Internet traffic without an unlimited exposure, and it is an approach that has
been used successfully in the past.
Taking L3 & Cogent completely out of this discussion, I'm not sure I agree with your assessment.

I think everyone agrees that unbalanced ratios can create a situation where one side pays more than the other. However, assuming something can be used to keep the costs equal (e.g. cold-potato?), I do not see how one network can tell another: "You can't send me what my customers are requesting of you."

If your business model is to provide flat-rate access, it is not _my_ responsibility to ensure your customers do not use more access than your flat-rate can compensate you to deliver.

--
TTFN,
patrick