On Tue, 25 May 2004, Paul Brislen wrote:
nope, no distinction was made... Telecom made the same claim to me earlier today as well, although Chris T stresses they haven't made any announcement about switching off peering at this stage.
Telecom's argument was this:
If you (Customer A) set up a video server in Invercargil (JuhaDownCountry.com) that for whatever reason got a lot of traffic, the telcos would have to install new capacity/servers/gear/etc to cope with the demand and they would need to recoup that cost from you, Customer A.
If you (Customer A) have setup a 10Meg connection to <wherever> then this will be charged to you via whoever supplies your link. Say we have the scenario.. Cust A |-- ISP xyz --| WIX |-- Telecom --| Telecom Customer And Customer A is in invercargil had telecom put in their 10 Meg link to ISP XYZ. Customer A get in excess of 10 meg of traffic and decides they need to get more. They approach Telecom and say "We need more bandwidth, give us 100Meg" Telecom say: "okie dokie, it will cost you <insert price to cover upgrade of link>" Customer A says "Okie dokie" and increases their link. As a result, Customer A can now send more than 10Meg/s of traffic through to their ISP, their ISP also probably increases their bill accordingly. Customer A has paid for this upgrade which will cover transit costs over the layer 1 network infrastructure, at this point NO traffic has entered Telecoms IP network. Now, Telecom Customer wants some of the content from teh spanky new 100Meg/s link that was put in. They say to Customer A "Oi, send me some data" so Customer A complies with this and sends it through. The ISP says "ooh, easiest way to send it to telecom's network is via WIX as it was a telecom customer asking for the stuff, we should pass this to them at the nearest point possible so they can control the quality of the traffic flow to their customer !" (this is why its good [tm] to use multiple peering points where possible) They pass it across the large routers and links at the peering point and from there on in its telecoms problem to get the data to their customer that requested (and paid for) the transit. The argument that "The Telco's would need to install new gear etc to cope with the load" is a bogus one, if they mean "At the peering points" then that is the price for having too many customers requesting lots of data and its what your customers pay you for, to maintain your equipment and links. It should be obvious that an ISP with 10 customers can probably get by on a zebra box, whereas an ISP with a 300,000 customer base probably needs more capacity, but then the ISP with 300,000 customers should be getting enough money from these customers to provide for network upgrades to cope with demand from these customers. Asking ISP xyz to pay for this, or the customers of ISP xyz is plain robbery, and using peering as an excuse is extortion. It raises costs for ISP xyz (either in commercial peering agreements or in purchases of more transit bandwidth), and also for Customer A. It should be the customer of Telecom paying for this if the upgrades are required, not the other way round. After saying this, I am not too sure why Telecom are being brought into this - it seems more like a Telstra "Anti-Peering" tactic which they have brought over from Australia with them. While Telecom are not the easiest to get a peering agreement from it IS possible using a little effort, Telstra on the other hand appear to be money grubbing to the maximum and trying to turn NZ into a little mirror image of Australia. It would be nice if for a change people could direct their angst where its supposed to be directed - mind you, it would also be nice if the ISP's could band together to fight this, but we all know that neither of these is going to happen and so we may as well sit back and watch our bills skyrocket instead. -- Steve.