On 3/29/07, Matthew Poole
Here's hoping that they get told that anything less than true neutral peering isn't good enough.
The question is what does the telling, mandate by the state is how carriers have been regulated for ever, and not alltogether successfully... The hope has been that competition would allow the market (mainly the customers) inform behaviour. Unfortunately, the customer suffers from the "seen/unseen" dichotomy and they don't see peering as a significant issue, what they see works, even badly, and they're mostly happy with that. We elect individuals to specialise in this area on our behalf and it was sad to see David Cunliffe parroting the Telecom line about "peering is complex." Umm, if it was, would so many small players and, lo!, even customers be doing it? Lets separate peering from Telecom and say the former is simple, the latter complex. As for regulation, there is the Commerce Act, which talks about the use of market power to suppress competition. Well, the only people who don't peer (in the APE/WIX bilateral permissionless way) are, oddly, large incumbents. Could be coincidence, but comments like Don's suggest there is an issue of market power that can lead to demands others cannot make. Not that this is something ComCom has ever AFAIK investigated, perhaps its unseen by them as an issue. The "Bill & Keep" model, where you charge your customers and don't attempt to indirectly charge the customers of other suppliers, is achieving more traction. What ever costs autonomous operators incur, they charge their customers. So if your customers are pulling/pushing a lot of traffic from somewhere/someone else, minimise the costs or charge your customers. The idea that someone else is responsible for the costs your customers incur is the wildest economic externality I've ever seen swallowed, TCO excepted of course. Matthew Bolland's comments from the cover of Telecommunications Review are at best ironic, "If ISPs choose to use overseas connections for national transit when, for half the price they can buy our national service, then that is their choice." And its a choice that TCL makes when it prefers to take RNZ from their US server than take it locally... I guess choosing the higher cost option is only stupid when you're smaller than them.
Matthew Poole
Hamish. -- http://del.icio.us/Hamish.MacEwan