[Everything in this email is my own uninformed personal opinion, and has absolutely nothing to do with TelstraClear's official position on anything at all. I'm not involved in any of this stuff, so don't quote me on anything, kthx] On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Tikiri Wicks wrote:
In that case what about if all the small ISP's as a group peer with one layer 3 switch at the APE and another one at the WIX. This way Telstra would have to peer with everyone or not peer with anyone.
Ah, but what happens when they choose not to peer with this group? And then what happens when Telecom takes a similar line? All of a sudden you've got a bunch of ISP's who are paying for international bandwidth through one of the other providers like AT&T, probably per byte, and they're having to use that bw to transit domestic traffic to everyone else. The problem is that the people making these decisions DO have reasons for making these changes... the reasons may be totally commercially based and have nothing to do with the feelgood ethos of the internet, but if the suits at TelstraClear are having those thoughts, I'll bet you a dollar there is someone in a suit at Telecom thinking "hey... if they can do it, so can we... and if we both do it, then everyone else will HAVE to buy a connection".
If all the non Telco ISP's were to be lumped into one pile that would be a lot of such internet services and web sites.
But remember, only the people who do not already have a TelstraClear service are potentially at risk of having their peering cut (according to jsr's quoted statement from Mathew Bolland).... How many of the non-telco ISP's in NZ don't have a TelstraClear link? How about if you add in the theory that Telecom takes the same line? All of a sudden your group of people is a whole lot smaller. While its nice to think that many ISP's will join your group trying to force peering, I think you'll find that many of them are still run by people who are more concerned about their business continuing and can't afford to take commercial risks just to uphold the ethos.
If all of these were as a group with rules that state peer with the all or do not peer at all. Essentially a gigabit Layer 3 switch at the NEW exchange. What this means is that parties would not peer with individual small ISP's rather they would peer with the entire group.
aka... the route servers?
The Telstra consumer would most probably switch to his friends connection.
I think there would be more to it than that. Especially if Telecom took the same line, thus forcing all the non-telco ISP's to use more expensive bw, and charge their customers international rates for what should be domestic traffic. I haven't been involved with any of this peering stuff, but my feeling is that perhaps (as Tony implied), there is a lot more to this than people realise, and in fact its not just TelstraClear trying to be big and bad. --- Matt Camp