Jeremy Brooking wrote:

Back on topic now... Isnt this dejavu? Didnt we go through his just months ago? So whats changed?

Are you thinking of November last year, when TelstraClear pulled its peering with ICONZ? What's changed... TelstraClear has written to customers that it has "informal agreements" with to say that these need to be replaced by "commercial" ones. Also, TelstraClear has said that it will stop peering at the APE and the WIX, and remove existing ports and connections there. If ISPs want to continue with said "domestic internet service", they will have to enter into a commercial agreement with TCL and establish connections at new sites. It also appears that in order to receive "domestic internet connectivity" ISPs that buy international transit from TelstraClear, must also buy domestic from it. All this will go into effect from November 1st this year. -- Juha

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Craig Spiers wrote:

If telstraclear, was to stop peering at APE, and remove 'ports and connections to there' wouldn't that limit them to only having 'domestic' data inside their own network?

Don't they use APE for data Telecom > TelstraClear ?

It was mentioned to me verbally that they were looking to how "big players worldwide" were doing it, and were looking to private peering. Did Telecom get notice like this? Otherwise you have a valid point, Craig. If so, will they move to private peering? I remember that before TCL and TCNZ would actually peer at APE there was a big huffle over whether TCL and TCNZ equipment would be allowed to "touch" each other. Ofcourse, perhaps they're concerned about SLA/QoS issues across APE and trying to guarantee a service to their customers thru SLAs when they can't get guarantees from the interconnect facilitator. aj -- Network Operations || noc. +64.9.915.1825 Maxnet || cell. +64.21.639.706

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Craig Spiers wrote: *SNIP*

for traffic between the networks, is going to push the price on domestic though the roof yet again.. And they have to pass charges onto someone etc..

Yeah, but we all know who they'll pass it onto - The poor, long-suffering customer. And since EVERYONE in the ISP game will have to start paying to peer with TC/TCNZ, the costs will be uniform so no one ISP would be able to benefit. The other alternative, and one that's probably fairly unpallatable, would be for the rest of the ISP community to just stop passing traffic for TC/TCNZ. Lock them out of the national traffic pattern, even if they come in through international links. Refuse to route to them. There're enough customers attached to the other players at APE/WIX to make this a credible threat - Fine, TC/TCNZ both have massive customer bases, but throw together Orcon, IHUG, CallPlus group, ICONZ, etc and suddenly you're coming in on a fairly equal footing. And since TC/TCNZ do not have any kind of monopoly on providing connections for major sites (NZ Dating and TradeMe, two of the major NZ sites, use providers other than TC/TCNZ), the outrage of their clients might see sense prevail.

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Barry Murphy wrote:

Poor poor helpdesk :( you'll kill us! But unfortunately I have to agree, it needs to be done.

Yes, the agony of the HellDesk had occurred to me. However, can you imagine how much worse it would be if every ISP had to put their prices up by $10/month in order to cover the cost of domestic transit? Just looking through the article again, I see that TC are claiming that increased local traffic is raising costs. Umm, HOW!? The circuit to APE is a fixed cost, there's no charge for traffic only for capacity. I'm sure WIX is the same.

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Alastair Johnson wrote:

The evil freeloading ISPs that they peer with are getting free access to the TCL network in order to transmit traffic to the TCL customer.

We haven't ever threatened to charge them for access to our network - and our traffic ratio with them is pretty close to 1:1.

They don't pay ICONZ either, and last time I looked at the graphs, we were sending them on average about twice what they're sending us. I think I made my opinions on the cleverness of this particular business move on TC's part clear, some months back. JSR -- John S Russell | Big Geek | Doing geek stuff.

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Barry Murphy wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Poole"

...

Just looking through the article again, I see that TC are claiming that increased local traffic is raising costs. Umm, HOW!? The circuit to APE is a fixed cost, there's no charge for traffic only for capacity. I'm sure WIX is the same.

Perhaps it's the amount of national traffic they doing these days because of 2mb cable (slowest plan available) customers, maybe they having to upgrade the speed of their peering links.

Those links are a fixed cost, though. And since they're using their own circuits, I fail to see how it can possibly be costing them enough to justify this. Sure, it's not terribly cheap to run ATM circuits around the place, but they already have ATM into the peering points so it's just a question of changing the rate-shape.

Paul Brislen wrote:

TelstraClear tells me the reason for the introduction is that some customers were happily peering with TC in Wellington and shipping data to Auckland over TC's backbone without having any formal (ie paid) relationship with TC for the carriage of said data.

Did they tell you where that data was destined? That is, did it go to non-TCL networks over TCL's links, or did it go to TCL's customers in Auckland?

Yes, I'm keen on writing a story if Juha doesn't soak up all the juicy quotes.

I've had my fill already... -- Juha The Net Ghoul

Paul Brislen wrote:

nope, no distinction was made... Telecom made the same claim to me earlier today as well, although Chris T stresses they haven't made any announcement about switching off peering at this stage.

Telecom's argument was this:

If you (Customer A) set up a video server in Invercargil (JuhaDownCountry.com) that for whatever reason got a lot of traffic, the telcos would have to install new capacity/servers/gear/etc to cope with the demand and they would need to recoup that cost from you, Customer A.

So they want money from content generators, basically, as well as their own customers. Is this what they'll tell the likes of TVNZ, the Herald, or Citylink for the matter, next time something like LOTR happens? It's worth noting that there are mechanisms, easily implemented, that can lower the amount of traffic coming from "JuhaDownCountry.com", or even prevent it completely, if said telco's network can't handle it. Citylink can attest to this.

I said but what about Customer B, the end user who is requesting that information - they pay already for that traffic.

Yes, yes they do, came the reply.

Double-dipping would seem to describe it, unless of course Customer A is used to subsidise the activities of Customer B, in which case stronger vocabulary should be employed. -- Juha

On 24 May 2004, at 20:18, Paul Brislen wrote:

TelstraClear tells me the reason for the introduction is that some customers were happily peering with TC in Wellington and shipping data to Auckland over TC's backbone without having any formal (ie paid) relationship with TC for the carriage of said data.

If that snippet is describing shipping traffic between an Auckland peer of TCL and a Wellington peer of TCL over TCL's network, then there are technical solutions to this problem which don't require TCL to de-peer (elements of which have been implemented in the past in one or more of AS 7714, AS 4763 and AS 4768). I haven't spent much time delving through the impressive pile of mail I just found in the nznog folder, but I thought it might be fun to throw a few observations into the mix: 1. The decision of whether or not to peer with someone always ends up being a business decision, in the absense of regulation, sooner or later. Business decisions are not necessarily driven by the public good. 2. When entities A and B stop peering, performance between A and B usually gets worse (or the cost of exchanging traffic between A and B increases), and usually either A or B wind up paying money to make things better. If A pays the money, then it's a fair bet that the de-peering hurt A more than it hurt B. B wins! 3. New Zealand isn't the first place where this kind of thing has happened, and you can bet it won't be the last. The sky has, as yet, not been observed to fall anywhere else, so predictions of apocalypse may be premature. As an ISP, having your cost structure changed is a pain, especially when you're stuck with 1-2 year contracts for transit that seemed like a good deal yesterday, but which are going to wind up feeling pretty expensive on November 1. Gnashing of teeth and waving of fists at the sky is to be expected. However, aren't TCL just implementing what Global Gateway have been doing all along? Are TCL really getting beaten up over this because they've had a more liberal peering policy in the past? Have people forgotten that the critical mass that has resulted in an APE which is worth connecting to was due (in part, at least) to the original open peering policies of AS 4768, AS 5763 and AS 7714? Did the first peering session across the APE not land at one side in AS 4768? There's a certain angle at which it seems like the more appropriate response is to say "thanks for the peering, it was good while it lasted". (For which, in some small and historic sense, I'm happy to say "you're welcome" :-) Joe

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Matthew Poole wrote:

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Craig Spiers wrote:

*SNIP*

...

for traffic between the networks, is going to push the price on domestic though the roof yet again.. And they have to pass charges onto someone etc..

Yeah, but we all know who they'll pass it onto - The poor, long-suffering customer. And since EVERYONE in the ISP game will have to start paying to peer with TC/TCNZ, the costs will be uniform so no one ISP would be able to benefit. The other alternative, and one that's probably fairly unpallatable, would be for the rest of the ISP community to just stop passing traffic for TC/TCNZ. Lock them out of the national traffic pattern, even if they come in through international links. Refuse to route to them. There're enough

So your answer to trying to persuade the telco's to peer with you is to activly prevent them from peering with you ? Surely this would give them someone else to point the blame finger at ? -- Steve.

Yeah, but we all know who they'll pass it onto - The poor, long-suffering customer. And since EVERYONE in the ISP game will have to start paying to peer with TC/TCNZ, the costs will be uniform so no one ISP would be able to benefit. The other alternative, and one that's probably fairly unpallatable, would be for the rest of the ISP community to just stop passing traffic for TC/TCNZ. Lock them out of the national traffic pattern, even if they come in through international links. Refuse to route to them. There're enough customers attached to the other players at APE/WIX to make this a credible threat - Fine, TC/TCNZ both have massive customer bases, but throw together Orcon, IHUG, CallPlus group, ICONZ, etc and suddenly you're coming in on a fairly equal footing. And since TC/TCNZ do not have any kind of monopoly on providing connections for major sites (NZ Dating and TradeMe, two of the major NZ sites, use providers other than TC/TCNZ), the outrage of their clients might see sense prevail.

Unfortunately the current situation looks more like the endgame of a great game of chess - one the little guys couldn't even see was being played. I think that responding to the threat when there's only two moves to checkmate is not really possible. Ofcourse, I would love to be proved wrong :) --- James Whatever My niece called me "Uncle Robot" on the weekend! Giant Robot Ltd, http://www.giantrobot.co.nz/

Remember the reason that Telecom and Telstra are doing this is that they believe that they will make more money in the long-term. They believe that one way to do this is to increase their revenue on National traffic. It would seem to me that the best way to convince T&T otherwise is to reduce their revenue by making them less attractive as wholesale providers. I've compiled a short list below of larger NZ companies and organizations that (IMHO) should be able to afford to peer at the main peering points (and would probably save money doing so) but don't appear to be doing so right now. Under interconnect pricing not only will they be paying to send traffic to other NZ companies but by picking a dodgy National provider (ie one that doesn't peer) they will be costing other NZ Internet users money. I would suggest that people strongly review sending traffic ( or advertising network ) from/to the following companies across paid links. They might especially want to review their access to free (especially high bandwidth) resources such as FTP mirrors. I would hope that at least a few of the below companies will look at peering within NZ and bypassing Telecom & Telstra's charging. If you are working for one of the companies then I'm sure there are plenty of people around to advise you on making the step and how you'll almost certainly save some money. NOTE: There may be some errors in the list (some people on WIX are probably missed) , but it's probably a good starting point. I suspect the loss of a few of these accounts will cancel out the income that Telstra and Telecom hope to make from charging extra for National. 129.222.0.0/15 UNISYS 129.222.0.0/14 UNISYS 130.195.0.0/16 Victoria University of Wellington 151.135.0.0/16 Opus International Consultants 153.111.0.0/16 Christchurch City Council 165.84.0.0/16 Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology 166.65.0.0/16 transpower 170.9.56.0/21 Keystone International 192.54.130.0/24 Wellinton City Council 192.88.190.0/24 Wellington Regional Council 192.94.169.0/24 GP Print Limited 192.105.10.0/24 Ministry of Education 192.148.221.0/24 Canterbury Regional Council 192.207.143.0/24 Far North District Council 202.14.20.0/22 Fletcher Challenge and everything else announced by Datacomm AS10022 130.217.0.0/16 Waikato University 130.216.0.0/16 Auckland University 130.123.0.0/16 Massey University 202.27.252.0/24 Lion Nathan Limited 202.37.64.0/23 Auckland City Council 139.80.0.0/16 University of Otago 156.62.0.0/16 Auckland University of Technology 203.99.64.0/20 Wilson & Horton Ltd 203.98.58.0/24 TVNZ 202.36.33.0/24 TVNZ 210.54.224.0/24 NZ Stock Exchange 162.112.0.0/16 AIR New Zealand 202.27.76.0/23 NZ Government 203.98.9.0/24 Auckland regional Council (and others) 210.55.180.0/24 ASB Bank 202.7.34.0/24 Westpac 203.57.240.0/23 BNZ 202.73.192.0/20 Vodafone 203.9.176.0/21 Carter Holt Harvey 202.12.105.0/24 F&P 210.55.51.0/24 foodtown and others 143.96.0.0/16 Unisys including Fonterra -- Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.

From: "Craig Spiers" If telstraclear, was to stop peering at APE, and remove 'ports and connections to there' wouldn't that limit them to only having 'domestic' data inside their own network?

This looks more like an attempt to change NZ from a Peering model to a Tiered model, perhaps Telstra think they have the best backbone in NZ and might be able to monopolise on it :) I am not completely familiar with the WIX/APE Topology, is there a dedicated circuit between the two to carry domestic traffic? If not, is it possible that domestic traffic could traverse both APE and WIX via TCL peering circuits to each? Cheers BG.

Brian Gibbons wrote:

...

From: "Craig Spiers" If telstraclear, was to stop peering at APE, and remove 'ports and connections to there' wouldn't that limit them to only having 'domestic' data inside their own network?

This looks more like an attempt to change NZ from a Peering model to a Tiered model, perhaps Telstra think they have the best backbone in NZ and might be able to monopolise on it :)

I am not completely familiar with the WIX/APE Topology, is there a dedicated circuit between the two to carry domestic traffic?

If not, is it possible that domestic traffic could traverse both APE and WIX via TCL peering circuits to each?

We could all possibly grab every redundant 10mbit hub in NZ and connect them down SH1 through the north island and call it CountryLink ? Add up all those offcuts of Cat5 plus these redundant hubs, we could start our own national ISP with VoIP ;)

On Wed, 26 May 2004, Tikiri Wickramasingha wrote: *SNIP*

Most of NZ Internet subscribers that I know dont give two hoots about Telecom or Telstra. If indeed the combined customer base of Orcon + IHUG + Callplus + the rest is simillar to that of TCL or TCNZ then why not drop peering with TCL & TCNZ completely. Just do it together as a group and most importantly dont forget to make a big fuss in the media.

TCNZ most definitely has the largest base of dialup customers, and it would take a combination of all the others to equal it. However, the combination of the others excluding TCL is larger than TCL itself. So there is a balance. Where the combination of the other ISPs does come in is their commercial user base. TCL/TCNZ aren't monopoly commercial providers, and the loss the services hanging off all the other ISPs would hurt deeply. Xtra's customer base suddenly being unable to access TradeMe and NZDating would kill their helldesk. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth. They cannot just peer with each other and pretend that all is well. Another result might be to get some of the larger content players to indulge in some direct peering - Throw U-AKL, Stuff, TVNZ et al onto APE and/or WIX, and suddenly the problem goes away again. The customers of the other ISPs would be able to reach that content, and as a side benefit the traffic costs incurred by the providers would decrease since they've now shifted a lot of domestic traffic onto a flat-rate link.

On Wed, 26 May 2004, Juha Saarinen wrote:

Matthew Poole wrote:

...

Xtra's customer base suddenly being unable to access TradeMe and NZDating would kill their helldesk.

Probably not. It's very hard for Joe and Joetta Dial-Up to figure out deliberately munted routing policy. They will assume that it's the Web site itself that's "slow and broken", or the network it is on. Said helldesk would be scripted to assign the blame elsewhere.

Yes, but said helldesk must first be contacted by Jo(e) User before they can play the scripted message. And it's those calls which would kill them. NZD has 250,000 accounts, TM is probably a lot more. Xtra will conservatively have 1/3 of the users of those, and TCL's stable probably about 1/5-1/4. Were those sites to just suddenly drop off the interweb, Jo(e)s' first reaction will be to whinge to the ISP that "that intarweb thingee" is broken. Nobody on this list under-estimates the lack of nous of the average user.

That's why refusing peering is powerful as a business lever. You decide who your end-users will do business with on the Interwebnet, basically.

Yes. But it cuts both ways, luckily, since neither TCL nor TCNZ has a disproprionate number of major clients. For its size, ICONZ seems to be doing quite well, and a few of the biggies are using international players to provide their connections. Were the weight firmly in the court of TCL or TCNZ, their threat to de-peer would be scary. But since things are distributed fairly evenly, a move by the rest of the ISP community to lock out the customers of TCL/TCNZ would carry a lot of force.

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 23:46, Peter Mott wrote:

Juha Saarinen wrote:

...

Matthew Poole wrote:

...

Xtra's customer base suddenly being unable to access TradeMe and NZDating would kill their helldesk.

Probably not. It's very hard for Joe and Joetta Dial-Up to figure out deliberately munted routing policy. They will assume that it's the Web site itself that's "slow and broken",

This is true. What happens is they ring the owner of the site who contacts the hosting company saying your network is broke because TCL/TCLNZ customers cant reach it.

It's a scam engineered to force people to host on TCL/TCLNZ networks.

Not entirely true. Say for example a site run by a bank. If the bank is informed in advance that TCL / TCNZ are upto no good. Then the bank prepares a script in advance. User rings bank Please hold and the next available service rep will be with you ..... Music on hold... Beep We wish to advice our customers using TC / TCNZ that they may experience difficulties in reaching our website. Beep...Music on hold. .....x minutes later [Bank] Good evening what can I do for you [User] See that Intarweb thingy where I do my bank stuff - it's broken. [Bank] I'm sorry sir but a large number of our customers that use TCNZ / TCL are having problems with the Intarweb thingy. You need to contact your IntarWeb company support desk. If they cant resolve it you may need to switch Intarweb Companies to someone other than TC / TCNZ [User] Oh Ok so if I change my Intarweb thingy company then it will work ? [Bank] Yes sir most definitely but you way want to speak to your Intarweb Company before doing so. Ring Ring [TCNZ / TCL] How can I help you sir [User] I need to use the Intar web thingy to access my bank and it's broken so either you fix your Intarweb or I change my Intarweb company. Information is power, Media is power. Bank site not working Customer cals Bank Bank says problem with ISP Customer doesn't care about ISP but does care about Bank Customer switches. Hate to say this but ISP's are almost a commodity these days. people dont know about market share. If Orcon, ICONZ, Maxnet, IHUG, plus the rest are working but TCL / TCNZ are not then people think hmmmm all those others are doing fine so problem must be TCL / TCNZ. The same argument goes the other way too but these days TCL / TCNZ have little if any good faith going for them in the public eye. Besides imaging a Website owner telling their customers. You need to use only TCL or TCNZ in order to access our site. Any other ISP's will not work. TCNZ / TCL cannot force Yahoo or Google into peering arrangements and in the same way I doubt they could force the NZ ISP's. Xtra stopped pop3 access to their servers from other ISP's. Did anyone switch ISP's because of that ? Instead some changed they email addresses while others simply forwarded their xtra mail to their mail accounts with their ISP's.

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Alastair Johnson wrote:

As it is a win-win commercial arrangement at the moment, any ideas on whether Telstraclear will be paying us for the service we're providing them? eg. settlement based interconnect/ cheque swap.

No. Experience suggests that they will not be. JSR -- John S Russell | Big Geek | Doing geek stuff.