On Fri, 28 May 2004, Seeby Woodhouse wrote:
Someone with some spare hands on their time needs to lobby the government to make peering in NZ legislation.
I've heard a couple of times the suggestion that this sort of thing also be established in Australia. Basically the government lists a bunch of Internet exchanges ( In Australia it would the one or two per state, In NZ I'd guess APE, WIX and perhaps a few others in Hamilton, Christchurch and Dunedin) and the ISP has to announce their domestic networks to them. http://www.voiceanddata.com.au/vd/feature_article/item_012004a.asp The main problem is that if we leave T&T to themselves then they will effectively suck extra revenue out of the end-user in NZ, Make it more difficult for smaller ISPs to compete, discourage the development of high speed services and encourage people to setup sites outside of New Zealand rather than inside. In Australia it's usually cheaper for ISPs to exchange traffic (3rd or 4th hand) with Telstra in Palo Alto rather than within Australia. I suspect we'll start seeing that in New Zealand.
Although TNZ and TCNZ will be wearing a lot of the network costs in terms of trunking traffic up and down the country, they also have most of the customers - so I think that's fair and justified.
Thats why you have exchanges in several centers. So Telecom can announce each region in the regional Exchange while (say) Maxnet might announce their entire Network in Auckland [1] since that is where all their Network equipment is.
If they are worried about people using their networks as a free national backbone via the peering points, there are ways to allow peering but prevent being used as free transit...
I was actually surprised that WIX and APE's Terms and Conditions don't explicitly ban this. Pipe has a bit that does: " Participants agree to never "default route" via another PIPE MLPA participant, without full agreement between both parties. The act of using a "default route" without permission can result in immediate termination services from the PIPE. " [2] and I suspect most other exchanges have similar rules. [1] - Of course Telstra could be evil an announce their networks in Dunedin only but you can either have rules to prevent that or just see it as regional development. [2] - http://www.pipenetworks.com/Peering/tr.shtml -- Simon J. Lyall. | Very Busy | Mail: simon(a)darkmere.gen.nz "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.