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