[it's 4am - I'm bored] Don Stokes wrote:
But this is sounding rather like, "you, pathetic little ISP, will pay me, big ugly telco, to reach MY peering point, because your existing peering arrangements are not worthy of my favour."
Perhaps. It's also very common for large carriers (of the telco and Internet kinds) to interconnect this way and not over public fabric. The majority of traffic in the US is exchanged via private links; and a significant amount in Europe as well. A hefty chunk of the traffic LINX 'moves' is private interconnects.
That doesn't sound like neutral peering to me. The whole point of peering is to reduce costs, not just add another way to hand money to carriers.
Interestingly, peering often adds costs or is not that much cheaper than transit. When transit falls to $10/mbps levels here (heh), you might find people giving up on peering. The ridiculously cheap transit prices in the US vs. the cost of building your own infrastructure to IXes has pushed a number of players to not bother with peering. Not to say that mass interconnection is bad.
A peering point is somewhere I can put a big pat pipe into to exchange traffic with lots of peers, *including* bilateral arrangements with transit providers, so I *don't* have to pay for lots of smaller (more easily congested) pipes to individual carriers, no matter how big and important they think they are.
Nobody's making you pay for circuits to other providers - if you're in a common location with your own infrastructure, you could interconnect. If you're not, well, nobody is MAKING you interconnect. You might find it's cheaper and beneficial for your business to do so... or you might not.
Having to be a Telecom customer to play is fine if you're already wholesaling DSL off them, but I'm getting rather tired of the attitude that an ISP is someone who wholesales off Telecom that seems to permeate most of these discussions.
Perhaps ISPs should stop focusing on being Telecom (re|whole)salers and focus on building their own networks and access mechanisms - the constant PR spiel about how LLU is going to save the world because ISPs will be putting in 50 million DSLAMs doesn't help here.
What about the rest of us who are doing stuff that doesn't involve sponging off Telecom infrastructure?
I think that's awesome and more people should be doing it. Why aren't they? aj.