On 27 June 2007 at 2:21 p.m, Joe Abley wrote:

It seems to me that this kind of arrangement (sharing the cost of circuits) is very much the way that voice interconnects between carriers were arranged back when I had occasion > to care about such things (via POIs, POLIs and SPOLIs).

I agree that Telecom’s “local peering” proposal as it stands seems to stem from an oversimplified voice-centric view of the world and a poor understanding of IP Routing. Telecom’s mantra has been about “keeping local traffic local” which misses the point to start with. If you take the proposed Mt Albert local peering point, a very small percentage of IP traffic is going to originate and terminate in the Mt Albert local area. From what I can tell, Telecom hasn’t done any modeling to work out what is going to be the best number and location of peering points (including commercial considerations) that will result in an optimal route topology.(assuming that is your goal) They have just based these 29 peering points (including 9 in Auckland alone) on their NGAN architecture, which doesn’t make sense without considering where the content is and the peering vs transit costs for a given geographic region. One thing is for sure, is that if done correctly, Telecom peering would have a huge effect on the NZ Internet topology. Mark