On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 12:51 +1200, Martin Kealey wrote:
[...] there are no common and widely accepted definitions of what peering and other related terms actually mean, where 'widely' encompasses the whole of industry.
We need to take off our techie hats and put on our lawyerie or accountant ones.
How about this:
Neutral Peering is peering at a Neutral Location.
A Neutral Location is one where the entity providing the location does not provide connectivity to that location (or does so "at arms length" and competing equally with all other connectivity providers).
That's a fairly thin argument given the distributed nature of some exchanges which is enabled by bandwidth.
A Neutral Location may be any physical size, provided that the location provider does not charge for traffic or bandwidth between participants within the location.
In other words, Citylink metro qualifies as a location encompassing all of Wellington, because there is no charge within the "location".
The Location is a building inside which the peering fabric resides. Anything more than that and we're talking about bandwidth. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
Telecom "peering" does not qualify because you can't backhaul your own cable and knock on their door saying "where do I plug in".
Where does it say that? It says "Marshall says providers would pay for circuits into Telecom's network" it doesn't say "Marshall says providers would pay for Telecom circuits into Telecom's network" --------- On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 11:14 +1000, Alastair Johnson wrote:
Okay, but if you're only interconnecting/exchanging at your local IX then suddenly this is not as useful as it sounded. Telecom's primary center of operations is indisputably Auckland. Does that mean that, e.g. Trademe, cannot reach TNZ across an IX?
Or do we come back to region-isation again?
The real issue is to get some consensus on how one defines regional/local. A sensible starting point is linking that decision to where the /32's within the networks that are peered are. Linking it to geography strictly is a great leap *backwards* towards LCA concepts in my view. Linking it to concentrations of competitive networks might be sensible. after all they tend to be where the people are. The thing to bear in mind that the bigger the metro is the more expensive it gets and the more it starts to look like national transit. "Yeah, my metro is 1000KM's long, and I'm going to charge you $160 per meg to connect with it" - sound familiar?
Are you going to pay for my long haul circuits to Palmy?
Is your primary centre of operations in Palmy? No? Why would you peer in Palmy, then?
Because you're regulating peering. If we must peer, then surely everyone needs to peer either everywhere (expensive), or at one IX (expensive for some).
Maybe, but this might be based on the presumption that there's only two paradigms. Peering, and International. That's clearly wrong. Just like the view that there's only National and International. That's equally wrong. The real deal is there's 3 zones. Local, National, and International. One day there might be regional as well. The point is that the price is vaguely linked to the cost of providing the infrastructure to cover the area in question. Of course market forces will influence that based on the existence of competition. And competition is related to the relative ease of providing the infrastructure to cover the area in question in the first place. What's really at stake here is the industry agreeing to accept that 3 high level grades of (more than 100 metres) transport (in terms of reach) is a valid concept. Maybe more if we can be sensible and it doesn't confuse the market. We used to have 3 grades. Then 2 entities decided there were 2 grades in 2004. Then some got confused that there was only 1 grade. Others got confused between local and national (or couldn't/wouldn't tell the difference). But we mostly understood that were there still 3 grades. Local. National. International. After all, 3 is the magic number. Ho ho. So we're back at the point where one of those entities recognises that again. Let's hope that we can all be sensible. 3-4 years is a while to wait, but I've seen worse.
Otherwise you're significantly reducing the benefit of it before you even start.
What happens if my POPs are islands and not connected to my backbone[s]? (think internap PNAPs) I'm only going to originate local prefixes anyway.
What if I don't want to haul Content Provider C's traffic from Palmy to my subscribers in Auckland because it's 50+Mbps?
Third option: regional based peering. My POP in PMR peers at the PNIX and only originates local prefixes.
And if providers wish to announce more than that, that's at their discretion.
These all sound like significant business and technical issues that would need to be addressed by regulation.
Unless your idea of regulation is to just focus on the big boys. Maybe that's fair, maybe that's not....
Good point. People! Try to think about living with the consequences after the war. That'll balance what you do today. Jamie