On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 09:54:19AM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote: > I would have to disagree with the description below. > > Dino Farinacci wrote: >>> Have you thought more about this now, and can you say something about it >>> on the list? >> >> It's the same answer I said when I was standing up at RRG. Providers >> will do whatever they can to attract traffic. They typically don't want >> to say no. The more traffic they attract the more peering they can get. >> And the business opportunities start from there. >> >> Dino > > When geographic addressing (for v6, or even for v4) was proposed, one of > the big issues, brought forward by the providers, was that it would > require the provider to accept traffic for any customer in the > geographic region, and deliver it. This was unacceptable. It costs > money to have infrastructure to handle packets. And no one was / is > paying for that infrastructure. Joel, that may have been a small part if it. But the larger reality was that geo/metro would have required a central authority and the fear was that such an arrangement would subject the settlement free bilateral arrangements that have really powered the growth of the internet to regulation. That was the main pushback. It really had little to do with attacting traffic. Vince Fuller can add any level of detatil you like on these points. That said, no one wants work they are not being paid for, but I can tell you from experience that the more traffic an ISP can get from peers, the better (of course transit is the best kind of (non-SMS) traffic, because it typically has the most favorable margins [given the OSRs in the design of most pops I've seen or worked on]). > This seems to me to be exactly the same issue as for PTRs as proposed. > There may be a way to deploy PTRs that gets them paid for, but I don't > know what it is. Again, business models in scope? > Ignoring economic issues is a recipe for failure. If no one can afford > to deploy the solution if it catches on, then they will avoid doing so. > (Yes, anyone can afford PTRs in the early stage. That's not the > question.) Uh, the IETF does precisely that, AFAIK. But if you want to take that on, do you really feel that this group is qualified to talk about ISP business models? As I said in a previous email, analyzing and documenting the cost distribution imposed by a given architecture is a good thing (tm), and would seem appropriate for this group. Speculating on what a given ISP might do with its particular business model seems at best ill-advised. That is especially true given the fact that I would suspect that very few of the folks who are involved in this thread have ever run a network of any scale, much less dealt with the biz people behind those networks. > And no, operators don't want to attract traffic. They may want peering > relationships (not all want them.) Joel, sorry, but this characterization is, to the best of my understanding and experience, just wrong. And ISPs only want peering to the extent they can't sell transit to downstreams or to the extent that they themselves can bypass upstream transit providers (like what you see with google and yahoo, or in the developing world these days, but this is an old story). > As Peter sarcastically but > accurately put it at the mike, they want to be paid for traffic, but > they don't actually want the traffic. As you point out, Peter was being sarcastic. He wants to build the biggerst network on the planet, and that means the network that attracts the most traffic. Same was true for UUNET back in the day (ask Vijay), or Verio (ask Andrew or heas), or Sprint, or ... It was all about getting traffic. Dave
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