[163834] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: net neutrality and peering wars continue
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo Bicknell)
Wed Jun 19 20:47:22 2013
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
In-Reply-To: <51C24D61.6000104@queuefull.net>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:46:38 -0500
To: Benson Schliesser <bensons@queuefull.net>
Cc: Ren Provo <ren.provo@gmail.com>,
North American Network Operators' Group <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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On Jun 19, 2013, at 7:31 PM, Benson Schliesser <bensons@queuefull.net> =
wrote:
> What do you mean "not really buy the balanced traffic story"? Ratio =
can matter when routing is asymmetric. (If costs can be approximated as =
distance x volume, forwarding hot-potato places a higher burden on the =
recipient...) And we've basically designed protocols that route =
asymmetrically by default. Measuring traffic ratios is the laziest =
solution to this problem, and thus the one we should've expected.
That was a great argument in 1993, and was in fact largely true in =
system that existed at that time. However today what you describe no =
longer really makes any sense.
While it is technically true that the protocols favor asymmetric =
routing, your theory is based on the idea that a content site exists in =
one location, and does not want to optimize the user experience. That =
really doesn't describe any of the large sources/sinks today. When you =
access "www.majorwebsite.com" today a lot of science (hi Akamai!) goes =
into directing users to servers that are close to them, trying to =
optimize things like RTT to improve performance. Content providers are =
generally doing the exact opposite of hot potato, they are cold =
potatoing entire racks into data centers close to the eyeballs at great =
cost to improve performance.
But to the extent a few people still have traffic patterns where they =
can asymmetrically route a large amount of traffic, the situation has =
also changed. In 1993 this was somewhat hard to detect, report, and =
share. Today any major provider has a netflow infrastructure where they =
can watch this phenomena in real time, no one is pulling the wool over =
their eyes. There are also plenty of fixes, for instance providers can =
exchange MED's to cold potato traffic, or could charge a sliding fee to =
recover the supposed differences.
The denial of peering also makes bad business sense from a dollars =
perspective. Let's say someone is asymmetric routing and causing an =
eyeball network extra long haul transport. Today they deny them peering =
due to ratio. The chance that the content network will buy full-priced =
transit from the eyeball network? Zero. It doesn't happen. Instead =
they will buy from some other provider who already has peering, and dump =
off the traffic. So the eyeball network still gets the traffic, gets it =
hidden in a larger traffic flow where they can't complain if it comes =
from one place, and get $0 for the trouble.
A much better business arrangement would be to tie a sliding fee to the =
ratio. Peering up to 2:1 is free. Up to 4:1 is $0.50/meg, up to 6:1 is =
$1.00/meg, up to 10:1 is $1.50 a meg. Eyeball network gets to recover =
their long haul transport costs, it's cheaper to the CDN than buying =
transit, and they can maintain a direct relationship where they can keep =
up with each other using things like Netflow reporting. While I'm sure =
there's some network somewhere that does a sane paid peering product =
like this, I've sure never seen it. For almost all networks it's a pure =
binary decision, free peering or full priced transit.
Quite frankly, if the people with MBA's understood the technical aspects =
of peering all of the current peering policies would be thrown out, and =
most of the peering coordinators fired. "Settlement" is a dirty word in =
the IP realm, but the basic concept makes sense. What was a bad idea =
was the telco idea of accounting for every call, every bit of data. =
Remember AT&T's 900 page iPhone bills when they first came out? Doing a =
settlement based on detailed traffic accounting would be stupid, but =
doing settlements based on traffic levels, and bit-mile costs would make =
a lot of sense, with balanced traffic being free.
Oh, and guess what, if people interconnected between CDN and eyeball =
networks better the users would see better experiences, and might be =
more likely to be satisfied with their service, and thus buy more. It's =
good business to have a product people like.
--=20
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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