[once more for good luck - maybe THIS time I'll get it on list] Matthew Poole wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Alastair Johnson wrote:
Every ISP at Every IX? Does it end at ISPs? What about universities, for instance? What about satellite networks where the uplink isn't necessarily NZ based?
At their local (to their primary centre of operations) IX, obviously. And I'm envisaging xx,000 being a sufficiently high number that only the University of Auckland (with around 40,000 FTE students) would even come close.
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?
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). 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. 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....
Doesn't sound like it would work so well, to me. If we said only the "major" IXs, what happens when the poor guy in Christchurch signs up his XX,000th customer and is forced to peer... but isn't getting access to the Big Boys?
Realistically, how many ISPs that are based outside AKL/WLG stand any chance of getting 50+,000 users? Remembering that of the top five, unless something has changed a lot in recent times, only Xtra and the TCL stable are > 100k.
If the government is serious about our OECD rankings, then I think many ISPs are going to hit >50k. If you believe press releases, Ihug, Orcon, and Callplus are all around (or over) the 100k mark.
Regulated peering sounds very scary to me...
Only if one takes it to absurdity. If it's regulated in such a way that only the very largest players could be affected, and the requirement on which IX(s) is based around centre(s) of operations, it's easily defined, easily enforced, and as I said won't really affect anyone other than TCL and TCNZ.
Which one may state is not particularly fair. Incidentally, what about Vodafone? I've noticed that traffic from a large number of smaller providers currently trombones via Tokyo and Sydney.
Oh, and on your point about universities, I think you will find that most (all?) of them already peer. UoA, which is far-and-away the largest university in the country, certainly peers at APE.
I think you'll find that UoA in particular does not peer [any longer]. UoW also does not. aj.