[39889] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The large ISPs and Peering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Feldman)
Wed Jul 25 21:29:09 2001
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 18:28:34 -0700
From: Steve Feldman <feldman@twincreeks.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Message-ID: <20010725182834.A13810@twincreeks.net>
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In-Reply-To: <20010725155130.A29106@samurai.sfo.dead-dog.com>; from msa@samurai.sfo.dead-dog.com on Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 03:51:30PM -0700
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Ok, my turn to weigh in on this. :)
First, can we stipulate that the "big players"
have to peer somewhere?
As I see it, there are two extremes:
1) a mesh of point-to-point circuits between sites,
(SONET, dark fiber, metro-gigE, etc.)
2) common colocation with local private links between routers
On the whole, option 2 seems easier to manage and potentially
less expensive. Here's why:
- There can be problems getting circuits between carriers.
I once heard from an engineer at one carrier-owned ISP
that a private peering circuit to another carrier-owned ISP
had been on order for over a year, because each carriers
refused to allow the other to carry the traffic on its fiber.
- It should cost less to bring a few large circuits into a central
facility and use the colocated router to multiplex the cheap local
peering circuits, than to provision a bunch of smaller metro circuits.
- It's much quicker to run fiber across a room than get a circuit
from any Telco. This makes additions and changes much easier.
Sure, a carrier-owned ISP likely can get ciruits into the colo
more easily, but it's not that expensive any more for others
to get in. There are a bunch of new companies building carrier
infrastructure and trying to sell cheap metro high-speed circuits
into popular buildings (I worked for one until recently),
and dark fiber is often available for even less.
As for the political question of peering policies,
I won't get into that except to say that it seems
an orthogonal issue to me.
Just my $.02,
Steve
