On 25 Nov 2003, at 08:19, Steve Withers wrote:
They also refuse to peer with AT&T anymore. To be fair, AT&T in the US treated TC the same way TC is treating ICONZ......sad to say.
The crux of the matter is that some network operators in New Zealand have started thinking about peering as a business issue rather than a technical one. This is nothing new in the context of the whole network, and it's not unknown within NZ either -- how many small ISPs were ever able to do zero-settlement peering with 4648? The question of whether the business decision in question is the right one is really a matter for TCL and their owners. But if you assume for a second that as a business decision it makes sense, then all TCL are doing is what they are supposed to be doing as a commercial company -- trying to maximise their profits. They're not a government department, and they're not a charity.
Telstra in Australia control the major peering point(s) and they charge by the MB for traffic - to everyone.
This might have been kind of true, once, almost, but it's not really an accurate statement now. There are numerous other peering facilities in major centres all round Australia where you can interconnect with substantial chunks of the Australian Internet. If the general peering situation in New Zealand has been less messed up than Australia, though, then that's mainly due to CLEAR (and, to some extent, Telstra NZ) for providing competition to Telecom early in the game and effectively avoiding the single-carrier dominance that happened for so long over the ditch. Also remember that it was people working at CLEAR who came up with the APE in the first place, and built it with assistance from their friends at Citylink. CLEAR and Plain were the first people to peer there. If CLEAR and Telstra NZ had not been willing to peer with people for so long at the APE, it's entirely possible that it would never have reached critical mass, and might not have grown to the size it is today.
I, and the ICONZ engineering staff, are currently treating this as damage and looking for a nice way to route around it.
This is absolutely the right approach. Wailing and gnashing of teeth is not going to make anything better. Here are some ideas, in no particular order: 1. Become a customer of TelstraClear. 2. Become a customer of someone who peers with TelstraClear (maybe just pay to receive 4768, 9901, 7714, 4763 and friends, and for your routes to be propagated to those ASes) 3. Become a customer of someone who is a customer of TelstraClear (maybe as above). 4. Peer with everybody you can at the APE and the WIX to maximise the amount of traffic you can send and receive without per-traffic cost, to mitigate the cost of reaching an exchange (Auckland) or the exchange reaching you (Wellington). 5. If you are able to interconnect with other networks in other innovative/cheap ways, do that. Build an exchange point. Drop a bit of cat5 down a riser to the ISP on the next floor. Sling a radio shot between rooftops. Negotiate for an extra pair of fibres across town from whomever is selling you dark fibre, and peer with the person on the other end of it. TelstraClear are presumably expecting that enough people do (1) that they win, especially if it means these peoplle stop being customers of Sprint, or Global Crossing, or someone else competing for international transit. The success of the APE and the WIX notwithstanding, maybe people have been lulled into not doing enough of (4) and (5), and have been relying too much on one or two peering sessions with big networks to shift their local packets locally. Maybe people should do more of (4) and (5). (4) and (5) are fun :-)
If any company - telecoms, toilet paper or toast - decides to behave in an amoral way, then society must impose the 'public good' on them....just as we do on any sociopathic person....or in this case, a sociopathic entity.
I think you're confusing amorality with immorality. Joe