[59115] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: from Dave Farber's list: Ireland to regulate peering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nick Hilliard)
Sun Jun 15 18:22:15 2003
X-Envelope-To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 23:21:30 +0100
From: Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org>
To: Roland Perry <roland@linx.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <kZkb8yAfoH7+EwsW@perry.co.uk>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Roland Perry wrote:
> In practice, regulators will only intervene at all, if one of the ISPs
> has SMP. This is now almost impossible to achieve (tests of "dominance"
> apply) especially with the diversity of transit providers. An SMP ISP
> would have to dominate the *entire* market for wholesale transit in a
> country.
Ireland differs significantly from the UK and many other european
countries in that the number of ISPs and wholesale transit providers
operating on the island is much smaller. While none of the ISPs has SMP
designation, it is conceivable that it could happen, given the relative
sizes of some of them.
That said, though, it is extremely unlikely that the regulation engine
is going to jump in and start dictating to the ISP's what they should or
shouldn't do wrt IP peering. There has been an industry-run IX (INEX -
http://www.inex.ie/) running for several years, and there have been
remarkably few squabbles about peering during its lifetime. For this
reason, if for no other, it is unlikely that SMP designation would serve
any useful purpose in this instance.
The ComReg directive is simply an implementation of directive
2002/19/EC, which will be applied in one form or another across all EU
member states.
These are personal opinions only. I do various work for the INEX, but
do not speak for them.
Nick
