On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Joe Abley wrote:
It's not unusual for global tier-1 carriers to find them relegated to the bottom of the stack when they deploy service in regional markets, and it's really not stretching the odious phrase "tier-1" in new and exciting ways to suggest that MCI are not tier-1 in New Zealand, just as TCL is not tier-1 anywhere outside New Zealand.
I agree totally. It's just amusing how TCL are thinking things through, and how little they understand the market. I've had a fairly large number of conversations with people inside TCL about their depeering and they have a lot of misconceptions. According to them, only "The Gang Of Seven" peer in the US. They totally ignore the niche IXes such as NYIIX, NOTA, LINX, AMS-IX, etc. Even little regionals in the US (eg. NAC) find that they can get a lot of content off their network via peering vs transit. BBC is another example: They've found it cheaper to build a global IP network to deliver the BBC.com content via mostly peering connections, instead of using transit.
They also said that "MCI won't peer with us in the US, so we won't peer with them here".
If you look beyond the mirth engendered by that quote given the networks' respective sizes (and the fact that, as you noticed, TCL is a customer of MCI), both MCI and TCL are really making the same point: MCI's peering requirements are nominally about deployed infrastructure across each of their three regions; TCL's peering requirements are about deployed infrastructure within New Zealand.
Well, TCL told me that if you don't have a national fiber-based network, they're not going to peer. So that effectively leaves only Telecom as a peer. Their problem was, say, an Auckland based ISP dumping megabits of content onto their network, for delivery to a customer in Christchurch. TCL has to haul the bits. And they don't like it. Without going into the whole debate again, it cracks me up that their ONLY peer with Telecom is in Auckland. Because GGI's network is in Auckland. Their other argument against peering with ISPs is that apparently we give free colocation to "hosters" (I assume he means content heavy sites or big webhosting firms) in order to build traffic volume to obtain peering. I don't know about other networks, but I know our IDC and network doesn't operate itself for free, so we certainly don't give it away. Domestic infrastructure still has definite costs. I guess we'll see what happens in 10 days.
It does make sense, kind of. If you turn your head sideways and squint a bit.
And stand on one leg, and bury your head in the sand. :) aj -- Network Operations || noc. +64.9.915.1825 Maxnet || cell. +64.21.639.706