On 1/31/2012 3:11 PM, Jay Daley wrote:
I've snipped a few bits to make this easier to read.
Thanks - I was trimming as I went but it was getting difficult. Long line wraps seem to be making my mail client sad too.
On 1/02/2012, at 11:49 AM, Alastair Johnson wrote:
What concerns me around the peering-is-an-issue flag being raised is that it is often raised a serious issue, possibly overshadowing more significant issues. There also seems to be a general lack of understanding about peering, and the current market situation.
I agree and would suggest that the more significant issue being overshadowed is the cost of transit.
Potentially; I think pretty much every consumer of transit would say that lower is better.
Performance is only an issue because of the poor state of the NZ IXs, but with those being tidied up that should cease to be an issue over time.
While Andy's efforts sounded pretty good to me, and I definitely support the industrialization/professionalization of the IXPs, that's not the performance issue I meant. What I was referring to is shifting bits across town, or even cross-country is much better performance wise (latency, jitter, packet loss, throughput) than tromboning overseas, or simply tromboning over international-but-not-leaving-the-country circuits.
The tromboning you mention does not have to be actively configured, it is the default route for any content hosted in Auckland (so avoiding any national transit) that is pulled by another network where the two networks don't exchange traffic and neither do their NZ-based upstreams. This can only be prevented if all the resellers of SX bandwidth exchange with every other. Does anyone know if that is the case?
I don't know for sure whether it is the case, but I've been unable to find any significant and definite examples of offshore-tromboning despite looking for them, and asking those who cite it as an issue. I've found accidental tromboning (misconfiguration), and some deliberate tromboning on *very* insignificant traffic paths, but never a significant traffic path that has gone offshore to turn around.
What I know does happen from speaking to content providers is that some find it sufficiently cheaper to host their content in the US than in NZ, even though that content has originated in NZ.
Indeed.
At least one of those operators does peer as far as I can tell. They might not peer openly at the traditional IXPs, but they do peer, on a settlement-free basis.
From what I gather, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, if you do peer with them you have to pay their capital costs and so, while it might appear settlement-free it isn't really. Besides which you've had to pay far higher capital costs to get there than them since they basically put the peering points where it suits them the most.
I can only go by the documentation that is on their website, but it doesn't mention capital costs and it does state "no charge for local exchange traffic".
Operators that don't peer, well, short of regulating it, what can you do? I suspect their position in the market might change over time post-UFB.
That would be tackling the wrong problem.
Agreed.
I did mean 'major transit providers' but only in the context of the NZ market and I take your point that holding a customerbase captive is another factor at play.
It is unfortunate. But that seems to be the market practice.